


𝙸 𝙻𝙾𝚅𝙴 𝚈𝙾𝚄 ~ 𝙰𝙰𝚁𝙾𝙽 𝙷𝙾𝚃𝙲𝙷𝙽𝙴𝚁

by imagineaworlds



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: AFAB reader - Freeform, Bondage, Car Sex, Cock Warming, Daddy Kink, Dom/sub, Domestic Fluff, Dominant Aaron Hotchner, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Handcuffs, Impregnation, Impregnation Kink, Kidnapping, Name-Calling, Nipple Clamps, Nipple Play, No Condom, Nonbinary Character, Oral Sex, Pet Names, Possessive Aaron Hotchner, Protective Aaron Hotchner, Reader-Interactive, Restraints, Rough Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sex Toys, Sir Kink, Smut, Submissive Character, Submissive Reader, They/Them, Top Aaron Hotchner, Unplanned Pregnancy, Vaginal Sex, brat reader, brat taming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:07:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 42
Words: 433,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26861866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagineaworlds/pseuds/imagineaworlds
Summary: "I lost my way on the way to you and in you I found all the way back to me." -AtticusThe stern unit chief has been through a lot. So much, that it made him easily forget of the light in life. However, it never stopped his love. For his son, for his team, for humanity, and for me.I love you, Aaron Hotchner.
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Original Character(s), Aaron Hotchner/Original Female Character(s), Aaron Hotchner/Reader
Comments: 50
Kudos: 158





	1. JOINING THE BAU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timeline: Joining the BAU. Before part two.

When my sister started working for the FBI, I couldn’t help but feel like she was stepping on my toes. She always spent her time being a detective on the West Coast, meanwhile I was the one who was working my way up the food chain at the Bureau. Our parents were proud of me for taking the initiative to go straight into the academy once I graduated college. My dad was still a professor at the Academy, even after my mom filed for divorce, and despite the fact that Elle hardly ever kept in contact with him, since she wasn’t obligated to because they were in no way related, he helped put in a good word for her at the BAU. So next thing I knew, my sister, Elle Greenaway was working in the unit I wanted, had the job I wanted, and was quite literally my boss. It was frustrating, to say the least. And she certainly knew how I felt about it. I hated that she got the job before me, and I hated that she hardly worked as hard as I was to get there. 

The good news about the situation, though, was that nearly six months into her job with the BAU, Elle managed to convince our boss, Jason Gideon to promote me to the team. That very day, he pulled me, Elle, and Agent Hotchner into his office to ask me about myself and what role I could bring to the BAU. Everyone in the unit gave a unique perspective to the cases, and no one was dead weight. Gideon wanted to know why I would be a valuable team mate. When I asked him about his son, Gideon leaned back in his chair and smirked. No one knew about his son except for Hotchner because they had been friends for years. I was a stranger beyond the fact that him and my father both taught at the academy together for a period of time. There was no way I could have known beyond my incredible profiling skills.

Gideon then handed me an old case file and asked me to review it then answer the question no one can answer. He didn’t tell me what the question was or anything else about the case. And when I was dismissed to go review the case, I could hear him asking Elle and Hotch what they thought about me joining the team.

As I took my leave to look over the case, I could see Agent Hotchner watching me through Gideon’s office window while they talked. I wasn’t an unknown face to him, of course. We had passed each other a few times at Quantico, and whenever I would meet Elle for lunch, we would exchange short acknowledging glances and polite smiles, but nothing necessarily beyond that.

Elle, immediately after leaving Gideon’s office, came to find me at my desk. She interrogated me about how I knew about his son when even she wasn’t aware. I put down the file and looked up at her to try and gauge how things went in the meeting after I was ordered to leave. She had come up to me in a hurry, and her question was phrased in a bewildered kind of manner rather than an upset one. She would have been upset if Gideon was upset, because if I were to have embarrassed her, the fingers would have been pointed at her rather than me. But she wasn’t upset. She was curious. Which meant that I had impressed them.

“How did you not know?” I interrogated back. She rolled her eyes and sat on the corner of my desk. “The pictures on the desk in the back of his room,” I began to explain, “they’re of all the different victims he has saved and kept in contact with over the years.”

“Yeah. So?”

“There’s one in the middle back. It’s of Agent Gideon standing with a man about our age. Their features match nearly entirely. Their hair, their noses, their mouths, and their postures. The man looks almost uncomfortable next to him, whereas in all of the other photos, they look happy.”

“So if it is his son, why keep it in the back instead of putting it up front or somewhere on his main desk?”

“He doesn’t want people to know. Him and his son don’t have a good relationship. Actually, I’d be surprised if they have talked at all in the past decade or so. He wants to have a reminder of his son, but he doesn’t want to announce it to the world, so he hides it with all of the other photos.”

Elle chuckled and shook her head. “How did you spot that so fast?”

“I’ve been after this job since I graduated. I’ve learned a lot about profiling and have spent years perfecting the craft. I don’t need to stare at something to know what I’m looking at. A quick glance is all I need.”

“Impressive,” Hotch said as he walked up from behind Elle. “There aren’t many who can profile Agent Gideon.” We shared our usual acknowledging glance and polite smile before looking away from each other. He put his hand on Elle’s shoulder, “We’ve got a lead.”

When they left to take care of the case, I turned back to the file which I was supposed to review. As I flipped the cover open, it dawned on me that I was holding the file to Agent Jason Gideon’s most famous case. Gideon alone was perhaps the only agent at the FBI who had so many famous cases in his career, and that was what made him so ideal to work with. But this case, in particular, was the one that everyone studied at the academy. The Footpath Killer. Now, though, I had the actual case file in my hand. I didn’t have to hear about it through the rumor mill anymore. I could know exactly what happened and how Jason Gideon caught him.

I spent hours reading every detail of the case from beginning to end. Nearly half way through, I noticed a piece in Gideon’s paperwork following the arrest which claimed that he was able to stop the Footpath Killer from killing him by telling him that he knew why the Unsub had a stutter. It was then that I realized something about why Gideon wanted me to read this. Despite having the profile of the Footpath Killer, they were unable to find him for so long until Gideon happened upon him at a random gas station in the middle of nowhere. And Gideon just so happened to know the answer to what the Footpath Killer had been wondering all this life: Why was he cursed with such a stutter. Gideon knew the answer and he was able to diffuse the situation by enlightening the Unsub. However, throughout the rest of the report, it never once mentions the answer Gideon gave to the Unsub. It was a peculiar detail that was surely overlooked by many… but I knew that something was missing. Even when I reached the end of the file and went back to make sure I didn’t miss it, I realized what Gideon wanted me to find out. Why did the Footpath Killer have a stutter?

I reviewed the profile nearly five more times, each time growing more frustrated. There I was, having just gloated about being able to profile anyone or anything with just one glance, and now I was falling short. I felt like a fraud. And I felt like I could hear the ticking of a clock in the back of my mind, just reminding me how little time I had to prove to Gideon that I deserved a spot in the BAU.

So I did the only other thing I could think to do. I started researching Agent Jason Gideon in the hopes of profiling him further to figure out how he could have known the answer to the stutter problem. There was no way he could have guessed, so he must have learned it from somewhere. But there was nothing— at least not related to the unanswerable question I was facing.

Agent Hotchner passed my desk again as he was reviewing a stack of papers in one hand while sipping hot coffee from a mug in the other hand. It was curious that he was all the way over by my desk. Only a few minutes prior he had pulled Elle away to discuss a lead, and now he was back, far from the location of the team’s base down the hall. There was no reason for him to be pacing around my cubicle other than the fact that he was sent to spy on my progress.

I spun around in my chair and bit the back of my pen as I watched him rotate around the room again. “Do _you_ know the answer?” I asked him. He froze in his path and looked up from his papers after realizing that he had been caught hovering. “You don’t have to tell me the answer itself. I just want to know if you know.”

“Does it matter?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

He let the papers fall to his side as he took a sip of his coffee. He quietly and politely smacked his lips, licked them, then stepped towards me. “We all know the answer.”

“Then I know what it is.” I set my pen down, closed the file, pushed out my chair, and stood. He raised a brow. “He doesn’t know why the Unsub had a stutter. He never mentioned the answer or told anyone the truth because even he doesn’t know.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I reviewed the file as many times as I could until my head started to spin, but there was no answer— not even a hidden one. Then, when I researched him, I realized that when he gives lectures about this case, he doesn’t bring up the question or the answer. Why? Because he’s afraid someone’s going to ask him and he won’t know what to say.”

“So you think that he doesn’t bring it up because it could perhaps discredit him.”

“No. I think he does it so that he can ask other people like me until one day he figures out the real reason.”

Hotchner smiled, “And that’s what the BAU is all about. Helping one another, giving different perspectives and insight. Being able to challenge yourself and those around you.” He set the papers on my desk. “Good job.” I looked at the papers to find that they were entirely blank. “You figured it out much quicker than Elle did, at least.” I bit back a chuckle. “Welcome to the BAU.”


	2. HOSTAGE CRISIS IN TEXAS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Being held hostage at gunpoint. All around mature content!
> 
> Timeline: Season 1 Episode 9. A month after part one.

The sun had barely peaked over the horizon outside when my cell phone started ringing on my bedside table. I groaned and rolled over, grabbing blindly in the dark for my phone. When I had a grip on it, I answered the call and brought the speaker to my ear. Groggily, I asked who was calling, only to find out that it was Elle. I groaned again and sat up in my bed, then asked why she was calling. On the other end, she sounded like she had been awake for hours, and was giddy to tell me some good news. Still half awake, I listened to her as she explained why she was calling at such an ungodly hour.

“Hotch is sending me to Texas to interview William Devries!” she exclaimed.

I cringed and pulled the phone away from my ear as her volume increased. When she was done shouting, I put the phone back against my ear and cheek. “Wait—” I wiped the sleep from my eyes as I tried to comprehend what she just told me. “Devries…” I was running the name through my head. “You mean the child murderer?”

“Yeah! Y/N, he’s sending  _ me _ . Isn’t this great? This is what I’ve been working towards.”

“That’s… great, Elle…”

I was biting my tongue to bar myself from saying anything that would ruin this for her. She was so excited about the opportunity, and I knew that I should’ve been excited for her, too; but how could I be when it still vexed me that she got the job with the BAU first, and now Hotchner was sending her to interview an infamous serial killer on her own for the unit’s research purposes.

To be fair, though, I didn’t expect that Hotch would have chosen me for this task, though, either. I had only been working with the BAU for about a month, which wasn’t enough time for me to prove that I was capable of interviewing someone like William Devries on my own. Despite that, however, I was still jealous of Elle. And it stung even worse as she continued to brag over the phone.

“All of this is to say, though, that I wanted to let you know that you won’t be seeing me until Friday. I’m heading down there now and I’ll be spending the week there. I just didn’t want you to worry about me.”

I chuckled. Me? Worried about Elle? Never. She could handle herself. Well, most of the time, at least. “Good luck. Travel safe and call me when you get to your hotel.”

“Alright, I will,” she responded. As I thought the call was over, I lifted the phone away to hang up, but I heard her call my name for my attention real quick. “I love you. Don't give Morgan too much of a rough time while I’m gone.”

“No promises,” I smiled.

She laughed on the other end. “I’ll see you Friday. Bye.”

“Bye.” And I hung up.

I put my phone back on the bedside table and tried to roll back over to get a few more hours of sleep, but my mind was repeating what Elle had told me again and again. I couldn’t get the jealousy out of my head, no matter how hard I tried. I loved my sister, truly; but I had been working tirelessly for decades for this job and the very opportunity she had just been given. I decided that I just needed to work harder. No more slacking off— at all. The BAU position was mine, now I just had to make it count.

When going back to sleep wasn’t an option anymore, I threw the covers off my body, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and got up. First and foremost, I opened the blinds to let the rising sunlight in. Then I started turning on all of the lights to trick myself into thinking that it was later than it really was.

The bedroom was cold as I tiptoed around towards my closet to pick out an outfit for the day. Most of my closet looked the same, as there wasn’t much that we were allowed to wear beyond pantsuits while in the office, and button downs and slacks in the field. Since joining the BAU, my days were never guaranteed to be in any one place. I could go for two days without a case in the field; then, boom, a week in the field without any time to go home and prep. So my best options for clothing were the button downs with slacks, and I could put a suit jacket over my shoulders when I needed to. But that was what filled the majority of my closet. Besides my work outfits, I only had a few dresses, only one sweatshirt Elle bought for me one year, and a couple of workout and training outfits. That was it, though. Not much past that, since I didn’t really need anything more than that.

Once I was dressed, I pulled my gun and badge from the drawer in my bedside table, clipped them to the waistband of my slacks, grabbed my phone, then headed out. I thought about perhaps getting coffee on the way to work since I was going to be ridiculously early and working on paperwork for the next few hours until everyone would show up; but I figured that the cheaper option was to just make a pot when I got to work. So I drove right past the coffee shop and made my way to Quantico.

Security let me through after they cleared my badge and inspected my weapon while I walked through the metal detectors. I thanked him politely as they gave me both items back and I was on my way upstairs. All of the hallways were quiet, and the only sounds that echoed were from the elevators traveling up and down, and the air conditioning pumping cool air into the building.

I sighed as I stepped into the elevator and pressed the floor number for the BAU. The doors began closing and I relaxed against the wall. That was until someone jammed their hand between the doors to save them from closing before they could get in. I stood back up straight and raised a brow as Aaron Hotchner hurried into the elevator.

I smiled and moved to one side of the elevator, but he didn’t look up at me or even apologize for holding up the elevator. He kept his eyes down until he turned to face the closing doors. My smile faded and I tried to run it through my head. Most people wouldn’t have thought twice about Hotch not smiling politely at them or wishing them a good morning, but it wasn’t like Hotch to not at least show those small courtesies for me.

In the past, even when Hotch and I didn’t know each other but recognized one another’s faces, we would pass by and exchange those short, awkward glances before smiling and moving on with our days. That was all. It didn’t mean much and it hardly took any effort, yet we always used to do it. Now, since joining the BAU, Hotch had stopped looking at me entirely. In fact, I would have guessed that he was trying to avoid me altogether but accidentally happened to catch the elevator at the wrong time and couldn’t see a polite way of backing out.

It was just all odd, the way Hotch was behaving around me. Especially considering the fact that he was the one who was more than happy to invite me onto the team. And he was the only one so far who hadn’t tried to get to know me. All of the others were curious about me, and despite their rule to not profile within the team, I knew that they all had privately profiled me, just like I profiled them— including Hotch. But he didn’t make the same effort, and it was just so unlike him. It told me that something was definitely wrong. That  _ I _ had done something wrong.

I tried asking Elle about it when we went out for lunch one time. I brought up that I was concerned that I had done something to offend Hotch, and that it was likely going to affect my work. Elle was adamant, however, that Hotch was always like this and that I didn’t need to worry. “He’ll warm up to you eventually,” were her exact words, actually. Yet, there we were, a little more than a month into my promotion, and my boss refused to even look at me.

So, what he did next, obviously, caught me by surprise. “What are you doing here so early?” he asked quietly, but he still didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed glued to the doors the whole time. I cleared my throat, shifted on the balls of my feet, and took a moment to myself to comprehend the answer to such an easy, meaningless question. “Why are you nervous?”

“I— Sorry… Elle called me this morning to tell me about her trip to Texas. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I figured I’d come here to start working on all of the paperwork I have.”

“Paperwork? What paperwork would you ha—” He chuckled to himself. “Ah. I see. Morgan?”

I nodded and chuckled, too. “Yeah. I get it, though. I’m the newbie, I gotta get hazed a bit by the team. I’m not too concerned. He means well.”

“Do the two of you get along?”

“That’s one way of putting it, yeah. He’s definitely tried to get to know me better than anyone else so far.”

“Well, he knows how hard you worked to get onto the team. He respects you, and I don’t blame him.”

The elevator doors reopened after what felt like an eternity. Hotch hurried out of the elevator and I followed at a slower pace so that I could watch him from a distance to gauge how that brief interaction went. He still wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t turning around or waiting up for me like he wanted to finish our conversation. So I concluded that he had only asked a question in the elevator so as to be polite and pass the time— but, then again, if he were worried about being polite, he wouldn’t have stopped smiling at me.

The curiosity was starting to eat me alive, and the only person who could give me any answers was at the office with me, alone. It was the prime time to ask him what I needed to know. So I followed Hotch into his office, catching him just as he was about to sit down.

“Can I ask you something?” I questioned, waiting outside his door until I was invited in. He shrugged, nodded, and I stepped inside, shutting the door behind me, just in case, by some off chance, someone would come in. “I don’t mean to bother you, but there’s something that’s been eating at me, and I just have to ask.” He shrugged again and took his seat at his desk. “What did I do to upset you?”

“I don’t understand,” he defended, opening up a file in front of him.

I took the liberty of sitting in one of the chairs across from him. He looked up at my movements through his eyelashes, but he didn’t look  _ at me _ . “We used to say hello to each other all the time before I took this job— and  _ I know _ that’s not something that I should be concerned about, but I’ve noticed that since I’ve taken this job with the unit, you refuse to look at me or address me. You take extra precautions to not face me, you give me the worst tasks or shifts during cases, and you don’t ask for my opinion on anything. You were the one who told me that the point of the BAU is to work as a team, and that we need to help one another solve the cases, so I don’t understand why I don't feel like that’s the case. So, I clearly must have done something wrong, or offended you somehow, and I just want to know how I can remedy the situation so that I can do my job well, sir.”

Hotch closed the file he had opened and dared to finally look up at me. “I’m sorry you feel that things have changed between us since you joined the unit. I meant no disrespect towards you or the work that you’re doing. If you  _ must _ know, however, I don’t hate you, I’m just very busy with my job. My responsibilities are double yours, and I don’t have time to constantly say hello or smile to you. In our line of work, you need to have tougher skin and not worry about what other people think or how they feel.”

“But I  _ do _ care what you think.”

“Why?”

I froze. First of all, I hadn’t anticipated that I would say something like that; second of all, I didn’t expect that he would inquire further about it. So I thought for a moment, trying to backpedal from the emotions boiling in the pit of my stomach. “We’re coworkers, and you’re my boss; If I don’t care what you think, then I can’t get better at my job… I can’t learn if I don’t care.”

Hotch bit his bottom lip slightly, like he was thinking long and hard about something that was churning over in his mind. While he hadn’t glanced at me once in the past month, he was now staring directly at me, as though he were trying to make some kind of point to me— but most importantly, himself.

“Truth be told—”

“Hotch,” JJ began, bursting into the room. Hotch looked up at her and I turned around in my seat. “Sorry, but we’ve got an emergency.” The three of us hurried out of Hotch’s office and walked to the boardroom. Sitting there and waiting for us was Reid, Morgan, and Garcia. “Okay, so, we do have live security footage being fed to us from a train stopped in North-West Texas.”

“Stopped?” Morgan questioned.

“Yeah. Some guy took five people hostage in one car, and the rest of the train has been evacuated by the local PD. There’s one security guard who’s dead from initial gunfire.”

“Anyone else injured yet? Any demands? Anything?” I asked, taking a seat next to Morgan.

JJ shook her head, “Nope.” She turned on the TV and began to play the live footage from the train, and Spencer started asking questions.

I watched the footage from my seat. Just as JJ said, there was an armed Unsub in the car, waving his weapon around in the faces of all of his hostages while they tried to hide in terror. He was screaming something at them, but I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting and as everyone was still trying to collect information. The Unsub twitched his left shoulder and looked over it to say something to someone that we couldn’t see from the angle of where the camera was.

“So why have we been called in for this case?” Morgan shrugged.

“Because of the complex physiological aspect of the Unsub,” Hotch answered, quickly flipping through the pages of the file JJ gave him on the way in. “But the list of things wrong with him is too long to even start—”

“Tardive Dyskinesia,” Spencer spoke up, squinting at the screen.

“What?”

“It’s a severe facial tics syndrome,” I explained, “but his entire left side is seizing up and ticking, not just his face.”

“No. He’s looking at something over his shoulder nervously, he’s not ticking. This syndrome develops after taking antipsychotic medicine for years.”

“Y/N is right, too, though,” Gideon insisted while walking into the boardroom. “Both of you are right, don’t discredit one another. The question is, why does his shoulder tic?”

“Does it matter?” JJ asked.

“Maybe.” Gideon walked up to the TV and watched the live feed for a minute or so, trying to build a profile on the Unsub, just like the rest of us. “Oh, my god…” he whispered in shock. Morgan and I looked to each other in confusion. “Elle…”

I stood from my chair at the mention of her name. She was headed to Texas. She didn’t say how, though— I only assumed that she was flying there. Everyone else started to gather up close in front of the TV to see what Gideon was looking at. Did he mean that Elle was already in Texas and could just meet us there? Or did he mean something worse? I prayed that it was the first option.

When I got close enough, Gideon put his finger on the screen and pointed at a woman sitting down on the train, her wrist handcuffed to the seats, and her cheek cut up. It  _ was  _ Elle. The moment I realized it, I was already dashing for my desk outside the boardroom, collecting my go-bag and my purse. The rest of the team was a few steps behind me, but they were rushing just as much as I was.

On the plane, I sat by myself in one of the single seats up front. Gideon, Reid, Morgan, and Hotch were sitting together at the table with four seats. With a three hour plane ride ahead of us and not much to do about the case other than wait until we got to the scene and could be debriefed by the local PD, Gideon and Reid were playing chess to keep their minds working, while Morgan and Hotch watched. I, on the other hand, was reviewing the case file again and again, even though my head started ache around the end of the first hour.

Garcia had typed up an outline of sorts which explained the train’s footage starting from just before the Unsub lashed out, up until we got the live stream. Everything  _ seemed _ normal before all hell broke loose. But that was how it always was, right? No one ever pictured that they would end up in a hostage situation on a random Tuesday. But it wasn't until the security officer passed through and leaned down to talk to Elle that everything spiraled out of control.

So that was the breaking point, the trigger, but why? Why would he have cared about them talking? Maybe he had a record, was on the run, and was nervous about two officers talking to one another. But how would he have known that Elle was a cop? Her badge or gun must have been showing somehow. Garcia’s report hardly mentioned Elle, though, and that was likely due to the fact that the camera couldn’t see anything of her until she tried to subdue the Unsub. There was no way of telling what Elle was doing that would have triggered the Unsub to lash out.

“That’s the eleventh time you’ve started over,” Hotch said, taking the empty single seat across from me.

I looked up and stopped biting my nails. “I’m surprised you were counting.”

“Like I said, I have double your responsibilities— and one of those includes making sure that you’re alright. I know I couldn’t have stopped you from getting on this flight, but… I have to ask if you think you can handle this case. It’s alright if you can’t.”

He wasn’t trying to sideline me, at least. So he was trying to repair the image he had painted of himself. That was a good sign. But he also knew the risks of putting an agent in the field when they had a personal connection to the case. Actually, I shouldn’t have been there all. Technically, Hotch should have ordered me to stay back at the office with JJ, and if I were to refuse, he should’ve sent me home entirely. But he didn’t.

“I’ll be fine, Hotch. Can you trust that I’ll do the right thing?”

“I don't know. Can I trust that you won’t do anything stupid just to save your sister?”

“I’d do anything to save all five of the hostages on that train. Not just my sister. If it means putting them before me, I’m willing to take that risk. If you want to call me stupid, sure. But I’m not going to let any of them die.”

Hotch stared at me. I wondered if he had any kind of idea that he didn’t have to choose between the two drastic measures of either ignoring me entirely or staring at me all day. When I went to talk to him, I hadn’t expected that he’d respond like this. It was almost like he was trying to make up for his behavior over the past month in just a few minutes.

“Alright. But I’ll sideline you if I have to.”

I shrugged and nodded. It was fair enough of him. He was my boss and he was just looking out for me, and he didn’t want the situation to go awry because of my feelings. Our job came first over all else, especially when it involved other people’s lives being at stake.

* * *

While driving out to where the train was stopped, Gideon asked us if we could call JJ so that we could get more information about how things had progressed during our three hour flight. He wanted to know if any demands had been made yet, but she said that there was hardly any contact between the Unsub and the officers on the scene. She said that they had only just managed to convince him to use the phone, and that he only wanted to talk to someone called “the higher authority”. Whatever that meant. We thanked JJ and I hung up the call. 

Gideon was staring out the right side window, lost in thought. Morgan was staring out the other one, and I was trapped between them. Meanwhile, Reid rode up front with Hotch, both of them reviewing the symptoms of Tardive Dyskinesia. After a few minutes of the backseat sitting in total silence, Gideon interrupted Hotch and Reid with what he had been thinking about.

“When we get there, we’ll wait thirty seconds before getting out of the car.  _ Don’t _ look at the train. Whatever you do, just don’t look at the train. This guy wants to talk to some kind of higher authority, so be it, we’ll become such authority.”

When we arrived at the stopped train, we did just that. Gideon stared at his watch, obsessively counting the seconds, while the rest of us watched the busy scene around us. The local police department was hurrying around like lost puppies, trying to figure out what to do about the hostages and the armed man inside. The rescue team was circling the train again for another threat analysis, which would ultimately prove to be useless. They were all just wasting time, trying to look busy, when, in reality, they had zero clue what they were all doing. That wasn’t to say that they’re shit at their jobs. I was sure they were fine, but they didn’t know how to handle an armed and psychotic hostage taker. They just weren’t prepared.

“Go,” Gideon said.

All four doors of the vehicle opened and everyone got out. Like Gideon ordered, none of us looked at the train, despite how desperate I felt to just see if I could get a look at Elle, see if she was alright and knew that I was there. But we had our orders.

Morgan closed the door behind me after I slid out of the car through his side. Everyone gathered around for their assignments and to talk with the Dallas Field Office representative. I entirely expected that they would all make me take the backseat to this, though, until Hotch said that he was going to talk with the hostage rescue team and asked me to go with him. Again, did Hotch understand that he didn’t have to go from ignoring me completely to babysitting me?

Hotch and I walked together towards the tent where the H.R.T was regrouping after circling the train. The leader of the team spotted us as we approached and began to walk us through everything they knew about the situation, even reviewing what we already knew, just to make sure we were aware. There were five hostages inside, including Elle. There was only one suspect inside, but he was delusional and had been screaming about the higher authority for the past few hours. If they were to proceed with a rescue attempt, it could result in a civilian fatality, and that wasn’t a risk we were willing to take.

We followed the leader of the team up to the convoy of cars that the field team was using as protection from any potential gunfire and to protect them from the Unsub’s eyesight. “We’ve got snipers at every angle,” he explained, “but it would take two shots to get in. One to break the glass, one to get the guy. By the time we break the glass, he could already move or shoot.”

“Alright, well, we might be able to negotiate with this guy,” Hotch responded. “But if his behavior or conversations in any way concern us that his endgame plan is to kill himself or the hostages, then I need you to take the shots and we’ll try to rush the train.”

The H.R.T leader agreed to our plan, then Hotch and I backed away from the car and slowly headed for the situational monitoring van that Gideon and the rest of the team headed to. When we stepped inside after Hotch held the door open for me, we realized that Gideon was already on the phone with one of the hostages who was speaking for the Unsub. Gideon was trying to get a read on the guy and was trying to play him.

“If you really are the higher authority, then you can have it removed,” the Unsub told Gideon. His voice was in a panic, and he was glancing around the train constantly. 

“He’s a paranoid schizophrenic,” I whispered to Hotch. “His body twitches every time he talks to someone who isn’t really there.” Whoever he was seeing was telling him that there was something that needed to be removed. The only question was, what was “it” and why did he think that it needed to be removed?

“That’ll take some time,” Gideon played along. “You know it can’t be done that quickly. Goodbye.”

“Wait— No!” he shouted. “Fine…  _ Fine! _ You have one hour! One hour to remove it or I’ll kill every agent on this train!” And then he hung up.

Gideon turned to the team for answers, but we all stared and shrugged. We didn’t know any more than him about “it”. We were suspicious of the fact that he could be schizophrenic, so it didn’t come as a shock to us. But, statistically speaking, most paranoid schizophrenics believed in higher beings— as he had proved by requesting for the higher authority. He could have believed in God, a demon, the devil, a fantasy creature, or even a terrifying monster; but he asked for a higher power and then questioned about the different ranks of the government.

“He thinks the government put something in him,” I said while they were all speculating. They turned to me with raised brows. All except Gideon, who was still focused on the TV. “The thing he wants removed is some kind of government tracker, or listening device, or camera. He thinks that the government is spying on him, which is why he wanted to speak to the higher authority.”

“The government doesn’t do that, though,” Morgan said.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s what he believes. And he’s not going to stop until it’s removed.”

“But how could we know what he thinks it is or where he thinks it is?” Hotch asked.

“His arm,” Gideon said, pointing to the TV.

We looked to see what he was talking about. One of the women on the train had managed to calm down the Unsub enough to talk to him, and she was holding out his arm for us to see. The Unsub had cut himself in multiple places on his arm. Not because he was depressed or trying to find relief through the pain, but because he had tried to dig it out himself on separate occasions, and failed each time.

“He thinks it’s a tracking device,” I concluded.

If he were to have believed that it was a camera, he would’ve been clawing at his eyes or cutting at his sternum; and if he believed that it was a listening device, he would have been cutting around his ears or his neck. But he chose his arm. It was a common delusion that the government would put tracking devices in people’s arms or feet. He had likely heard the rumor and/or conspiracy about people finding microchips in their arms, and because of his psychosis, he fell victim to the conspiracy, too.

Morgan’s phone rang and he stepped back to take the call. I began to explain my reasoning to Gideon, Hotch, and Reid while Reid tried to push back and also help with his own information. That was what he always did with me. If I ever slipped up on one word, he would catch me and correct me— but, for the most part, he always tried to help elaborate on my theories in order to build and fortify the profiles of the Unsubs that we were creating. With this Unsub, in particular, Reid happened to know a lot about his psychology and could give the medical perspective of my reasoning.

Morgan came back, “The lady holding his arm is his doctor. They were headed to a convention to give a speech about the improvements in the field and the success they’ve had with this example of severe psychosis.”

“Makes sense how she knew about the cuts and could get close enough to him to show us his arm.” I said.

“Could she trick him into pretending that she removed the microchip?” Hotch inquired. Reid and I shook our heads simultaneously. “Then how do  _ we _ trick him into thinking it?”

Reid started pacing between the width of the van while he thought. “Like Y/N said, he chose his arm because of the type of monitoring he thinks that the government placed on him. He didn’t choose his foot, knee, or back. He chose his arm. Anything we try with him, he’ll be watching to make sure we don’t pull anything and to make sure that he is correct.”

“Maybe we can just try to reason with him,” Morgan offered. A chuckle escaped my throat. He smiled slightly, “Something funny, precious?”

“He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. You’re not going to reason with him.”

“So, then, what do you suggest we do?”

“Magic,” Reid interrupted. Morgan was the one to chuckle this time, which seemed like a challenge to Reid, so he explained further. “Using sleight of hand, I can hide a microchip in my hand and make him think that it came out his arm.”

“No,” Hotch said gruffly. “We can’t risk him taking another agent hostage. I’m not going to put the team in that position.”

“I can do this, Hotch. I’ve been doing it since high school— I used to do it during college exams all the time because I would finish before they would let me leave.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course that happened to Spencer. Of course he was so well known by his professors for speeding through exams that they actually had to put a time on him. He had always been so smart, and he was so young when he went to college. His professors probably hated that he was smarter than them and he was only a kid. They wanted to punish him, or maybe even just force him to look back over the exams to check his work. But he never needed to look at those types of tests more than once. He hardly needed to review anything more than once. He was just gifted like that.

“We have to try it,” Gideon insisted, taking Spencer’s side and going over Hotch’s head. Hotch threw up his arms, giving up. “Let the rescue team know what we’re going to try. Tell them to stand by for the signal to go in.”

“We’re really going to do this?” Morgan asked, bewildered. “We can’t just put Spencer on that train with an armed Unsub.”

“We don’t have any other choice. Hotch, Y/N, go.”

Hotch shook his head slightly, rolling his eyes at Gideon’s arrogance. When he came to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t be able to change anyone’s mind about this, Hotch led me out of the van and back to the frontline to talk with the H.R.T leader. We caught him up to speed with our new plan, and he seemed just as unsure as Hotch was, but there really wasn’t enough time to argue with him about it or try to go back and convince Gideon of a different plan that didn’t include sending another agent in there.

Hotch asked if he could use one of the walkie-talkies that was just sitting around, unused by anyone on our team or theirs. The leader agreed, even handing it to Hotch, but then immediately regretted it when he witnessed Hotch tearing it apart to get into the wiring inside. The H.R.T leader asked what we were doing with that, and I explained that we needed a microchip in order to convince the Unsub that it was actually real. Just as I said it, Hotch pulled out the small chip from the walkie-talkie and held it up for me to inspect.

“It should work,” I said, trying to convince him and myself.

“I don’t know about this,” the leader admitted.

“It’ll look better when it’s covered,” Hotch said, hiding the microchip in his palm and handing the ruined walkie-talkie back. The leader asked what Hotch meant by “covered” and Hotch responded with: “Blood.” And then he started pulling me back towards the tent where Gideon and Morgan were standing with Reid, trying to prep him. “One government issued microchip,” Hotch joked flatly, handing it over to Reid.

“This is stupid,” Morgan insisted. “It won’t work.”

“It has to if we want to get Elle off that train,” I said and they all fell silent.

They had been considering all day how they couldn’t afford to lose Elle, either, but they hadn’t stopped to think about how I felt about it until just then. If our plan where to go awry, they would lose a friend, and it would sting, but those kinds of wounds heal. Losing a sister, on the other hand. No one gets over that. Ever. And I was sure that Reid was trying to find some kind of positive statistic to give me that would reassure me, but he was falling short.

“You do what you need to do,” Gideon turned back to Spencer, “and then you walk right back off that train. No waiting around or trying to help Elle yet. Get the chip out, then tell him that you need to get back to the higher authority. Got it?”

“I get it.” His voice changed pitch towards the end of his sentence, which meant that he didn’t believe it. He was nervous and he was running through every possible shitty outcome and the statistics around it. “Can you guys do me a favor, though?” We all nodded. “Could one of you at least look like you’re going to see me again?”

I realized suddenly how pale my face must have been and how my pulse was racing. It had happened subconsciously, otherwise I would’ve washed the feeling of it all away before Reid could notice. But we all looked like we were staring at a ghost, and that was what made him the most uncomfortable. He was looking for reassurance that it would be okay, and we were failing as friends in that moment.

“We’ll see you when you get back, bud,” Morgan patted Spencer’s shoulder.

Spencer faked a smile and nodded, still trying to reassure himself. After, once he saw that we were all smiling, too, he headed off towards the train. Gideon and Morgan stayed where they were while Hotch and I went back to the frontline to be with the H.R.T. Reid nervously walked towards the train, almost tripping over his own feet at one point. Hotch was getting nervous, too. He told the H.R.T leader to be ready to move in if things went South, but he reminded us that it would be hard to get a shot and get in. 

Hotch turned his walkie over in his hands while trying to ignore his sweaty palms. I spotted that and his bouncing knee out of the corner of my eye. “He’s got this,” I said. “It’ll work.”

Just then, Hotch’s walkie hummed as someone on the other end pressed the button to say something. “He got the chip out,” Morgan said with relief. “Wait—”

“What is it?” Hotch questioning, bringing the walkie up to his mouth.

“The Unsub’s not letting Spencer leave.”

I pushed my hands off the car we were hiding behind and opened the nearby backseat car door. I leaned into the vehicle, stretched to reach into the trunk, and grabbed a bulletproof vest. When I had a grasp on it, I climbed back out of the car, shut the door, and lifted the vest over my head.

“What are you doing?” Hotch asked me.

I looked down at the velcro pads that I needed to connect. “Ending this.” I started walking past the line of cars and towards the train. Hotch ran up behind me and jumped in my path before I could get anywhere near the train. He was trying to stop me from doing something stupid, as he would classify it, but I knew that it was possibly our only shot of just finishing this once and for all. “They need two shots, Hotch. One at the window, and one to kill. If I can get on the train and distract him, I might be able to shoot him or keep him occupied long enough for the snipers to get both shots in.”

Hotch grabbed my left bicep, spun me around, and started dragging me back behind the cars. “You’re not fucking doing that.”

I tried to pull my arm away, but his grip only tightened. “We have to do something.”

“I’m close to benching you, Greenaway. You know that you can’t go on that train, and you know that we won’t let you. So just sit your ass down in the van with Gideon and Morgan, and wait for orders. Got it?”

“Hotch—”

“ _ Got it? _ ”

I pulled my arm away with one more forceful pull. We stared at each other, our faces close and burning with rage. He was angry that I was about to do something idiotic, and he was regretting bringing me along. Meanwhile, I was upset that he couldn’t just let me do my job. He searched my eyes like he was waiting for me to fight back, but as I searched his, too, I realized that it wasn’t worth fighting him. We were supposed to be a team, right? And part of being a team was obeying my superior officer. So I backed off and stormed into the van like he ordered.

The door slammed behind me. Morgan looked at me over his shoulder briefly before turning back to the TV. Gideon was trying to call the Unsub again. He was looking for another out now. But the phone kept ringing, and the Unsub stayed put in his seat, pointing his gun at Reid.

As I approached the TV, I got a better look at the unfolding events. Reid had successfully “pulled out the microchip” from his arm, but one of the hostages was starting to pick a fight with Spencer, which only agitated the Unsub. The doctor, Reid, and Elle were all trying to diffuse the tension, but the Unsub’s left side twitched again as he said something to someone invisible. Before I could warn the team of what was going to happen, though, the Unsub was already on his feet and he shot the doctor. Everyone on the train yelped at the sound of gunfire. Reid hurried to the doctor to start putting pressure on her wounds so that she wouldn’t bleed out. Now we definitely had to hurry and end this once and for all.

The Unbsub hurried to the phone and picked up the call. Gideon kept his cool. “What happened in there, Ted?” I didn’t realize we had his name already. Garcia must have figured it out while Hotch and I were outside. “I did what you asked for.”

“I’m tired… I’m done fighting. I’m sick of this. It’s going to end today…” He dropped the phone, but he didn’t hang up. He just simply… gave up… Like he promised that he would.

Hotch was already standing directly behind me, ready to catch me when I turned around to head back out. I didn’t care what my orders were or how stupid it might have been, but I wanted to go into that train and save my sister. I wanted to save all of them, just like I promised Hotch on the plane, but… This was Elle. This was my sister. And he was going to kill them all, including her. I had to do something. But Hotch was already one step ahead of me, and he wasn’t letting me out of that van.

Gideon called again and Ted lifted his gun at one of the other hostages. I thought that he would shoot her, but as she jumped out of the way, he shot the phone and the call ended. There went our only way of communicating with him. That was our last chance to try to end this peacefully. We literally only had minutes, if that, to save those people now.

“Let me know when H.R.T is ready,” Gideon said to Hotch.

“I’ll go in with them,” I said, trying to step around Hotch quickly, but he caught my arm again.

Hotch looked at me again, searching my eyes this time for reassurance that he could trust me outside of that van. “You follow my lead?” I nodded eagerly. I’d do anything at that point, even if it meant being tied to Hotch the whole time. “Let’s go.”

He let me step around him and run out the van. When we hurried back up to the cars to tell the H.R.T leader what was going on, Hotch reached into the car and grabbed another vest. I stopped explaining to watch him put on his vest, thinking of the best way to tell him no without sounding like a huge hypocrite.

“Hotch, no. You’ve got a kid at home. No.”

“We’ll follow your lead,” Hotch told the team leader, “but we’re going to try to talk with him before we start shooting.”

“Are you sure? You’ve already got two agents in there.”

“Yeah, because we were playing nice. I’m not taking this asshole’s shit anymore.” Hotch finished strapping his vest on and pulled out his gun. I pulled mine out, too. He was the first to take a step out in front of the cars. We rushed up against the side of the train so that Ted couldn’t see us sneaking onto the train. Hotch turned back to me to make sure I was still following, and I nodded. He gestured forward with two fingers, so I stepped around him and hurried a few large steps up towards the train car’s entrance. I waited at the bottom of the steps for his go-ahead. “One… two…” And then there was a sound of another gunshot. I didn’t hesitate for the last count before jumping up the steps and kicking the door in with my weapon raised. “Y/N!” Hotch called after me, but I didn’t listen as I ran in.

I lowered my weapon as I saw Spencer standing over Ted’s dead body laying on one of the seats. Spencer had disarmed the suspect already by the time one of the hostages had shot him. Elle looked up at me and pulled against her handcuffs, desperate to hug me.

I ran past Reid and up to Elle, “Where’s the key?”

“Still on the security guard,” she answered.

Hotch went to make sure that Reid was okay, but all he did was tell our boss that we needed at least two ambulances. I walked down two more seats to find the dead security guard laying on the floor, dead. I thought up an apology in my head before reaching down and finding the key to the handcuffs in his pocket.

I returned to Elle and swiftly freed her. In an instant, her arms flew around my neck and she held me tight. I hugged her torso as she hid her face in the crook of my neck. “You alright?” I asked quietly.

She nodded. “I fucking hate Texas.”

I chuckled, and so did she. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“One can only hope.”

She was the first to part from our hug. She hit my arm playfully and smiled. Hotch came over to check on her, too. She told him that she was alright, then he ordered us to get off the train with the other hostages so that the paramedics could get on. Elle and I agreed and started corralling the other three hostages.

Outside, Morgan came up to us almost immediately and hugged Elle. She insisted that she was alright and that everyone should stop worrying about her, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. We both told her to get checked out by the paramedics as they arrived on scene, but Elle kept trying to deflect by asking about Reid, or where JJ was, or persisting that Ted and the doctor should be seen first. We tried to tell her that she was just as important, but she wouldn’t listen until Gideon came over and told her that she had to.

“Whatever you say, dad,” Elle joked.

Morgan and I looked at each other with wide eyes. She was so dead. Oh, my fucking god— She literally had a death wish. But Gideon, for some reason, just smiled and started to walk away. Morgan and I were in total disbelief.

“Elle?” Gideon backpedaled. “Don’t ever call me that again.” He walked off and we all let out a sigh of relief. That was the Gideon we knew.

* * *

Elle and I sat on the plane together. She was sitting in the window seat, me in the aisle. Around the first thirty minutes of the flight is when she fell asleep, and I couldn’t blame her. She had a rough day, and was understandably exhausted, so I let her rest. I think that she was also disappointed that Hotch decided to appeal her job down in Texas with Devries. Elle had been so looking forward to it, and just because some guy took her hostage, she didn’t get to go interview him. I supposed that anyone else would have been desperate to get home after something like that, but not Elle. We were the same in the way that we both wanted to do our jobs, no matter what, even if that meant going straight there after being held hostage for over six hours.

Hotch came over to our seats while working his way back to the mini bar. Before we got on the plane, he asked if he could talk to me, and I originally offered that he could sit with me, but Elle wanted the comfort, and I couldn’t deny her that. But now that she was asleep, he had come over to see if it was a good time. I knew why he was there, I didn’t play coy, so I offered him a spot on the empty couch that was right across the aisle.

Hotch took a seat. He leaned forward, propping his elbows up on his knees. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“I told you to not do anything stupid. But that was the most reckless I’ve ever seen you. I thought that you said you would behave yourself and not let your feelings get in the way.”

“I was just doing my job, Hotch. Sitting around and waiting wasn’t doing anyone any good. We didn’t fix anything by just calling him repeatedly. I had a solution and I was going to go through with it if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“You would have died.”

“But at least that doctor wouldn’t be in the hospital and Reid wouldn’t have had to go in there alone.”

“That’s not fair of you—”

“Hotch,” Gideon called from the other end of the plane. We stopped talking and looked over at him. He wanted to discuss something about the next few cases that JJ was considering giving to us.

Hotch sighed, “We’ll talk about this later.” He stood and left again to go talk with Gideon.

I started biting my nails again as he sat down on the other side of the plane. I couldn’t figure out why he was so mad. As a subordinate, I figured that it was probably due to my lack of respect and obedience, but as a profile, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something was still wrong between us, but it was different now that he was trying to spend more time with me. It was wrong in the way that he was being too overbearing so as to hide something. I just didn’t understand what it could possibly be, though.

After the flight, Morgan offered to drive Elle home since it was on his way, whereas it was out of the way for me. Not to mention that Hotch still wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t want to tell Morgan and Elle that. So everyone left for home after getting off the plane. All except for me and Hotch. We headed back to the office together, but not really. We were quiet the whole time, even though I thought that the whole point of this was that he wanted to talk to me.

Back at the BAU, it was quiet with no one else around. I dropped my things at my desk and followed Hotch up the ramp and into his office. He closed the door behind me and I took a seat. My eyes followed him as he kept his gaze down again and sat across from me.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect—”

“Can I ask you something?” he interrupted. I nodded slowly. Was I about to get fired? Was that what was going on? “You profiled me this morning. How did you come to the conclusion that I disliked you?”

“Oh…” I hesitated to say anything. I didn’t realize that I had indeed, technically, profiled him. That wasn’t my intention, and I knew that we weren’t allowed to profile one another. That was probably why I was in trouble. “Well, based on your behaviors, it could have meant that you were either hiding something from me or you disliked me. I figured that since you shouldn’t have anything to hide from me of notable importance, the only other option was that you disliked me.”

Hotch bit his bottom lip again, just like he had that morning when he was trying to hold something back. “The truth is, I have been hiding something from you.” He sighed and started mindlessly playing with one of the pens on his desk to keep his mind occupied with something other than the worry of admitting what he was about to say. “You have to understand that I take my job very seriously. I don’t like to bend the rules, because I helped write them. But I’ve seen you around here for years, and you’ve always caught my eye. I never needed to walk all the way down by your old office just for coffee or to give some random intern some papers. I just wanted to see you and your smile… Even when I was still married, I would go out of my way to see you… But now that I’m not married anymore and you’re on the team, my attraction to you has only grown stronger. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, and I didn’t want my personal feelings to impact our work, so I made it my personal mission to avoid you; but while trying to protect you, I only ended up hurting you, and I apologize for that. I also know, however, how hard you’ve worked to get this promotion and how seriously you take your job. What you did today was the right thing, and I shouldn’t have held you back for personal fears I have—”

“Hotch,” I began, trying to catch his attention away from his ramble. He looked up from his pen and at my eyes. “Elle and I never really got along— especially when she got the BAU promotion before me. I didn’t have to come all the way over here just to have lunch with her or talk to her about dumb things like paperwork. I did it because it was the only other time I could see you when you weren’t passing by my desk randomly. I told you this morning that I care what you think about me, and I told you that it’s because I respect you as my superior— and that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. I care because I’ve noticed you, too. And it made my stomach churn to think that you hated me.”

Hotch chuckled quietly. How stupid were we both for not noticing the signs? As profilers, it was ironic that we hadn’t put together the one thing that was normally the most obvious thing to profile. Attraction had always been easy to spot, especially when it came to other people. But when it came to me… Well, I wouldn’t have known. Before learning to profile, which would have been in high school, people used to just come up to me and flat out ask me out, because we were in high school, no one had any shame at that age. But Hotch and I had been dancing around each other for  _ years _ and neither of us noticed.

“Elle went home with Morgan, by the way,” I said randomly, as if that meant anything or somehow pertained to the topic. My brain seemed to think it was enough to discuss, anyways.

“Are you headed home?”

“I don’t exactly have anything planned tonight. So, maybe— unless something comes up.”

Hotch gulped. “I know a great restaurant a few blocks from here, if you want to grab dinner…”

I smiled and nodded, “I’d love that.”


	3. SAYING "I LOVE YOU" FOR THE FIRST TIME

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs.
> 
> Timeline: Season 1 Episode 22. Three months after part two.

Hotch and I started dating after a little more than a month into my promotion at the BAU. I knew it was stupid. We both knew that Gideon wouldn’t like it, and I knew that I had worked too hard to get where I was to just throw it all away for a guy. I knew it. Okay. I did. And yet… I couldn’t help myself. Neither of us could help it. He was still my superior, and we were still coworkers, and the situation certainly wasn’t ideal. And yet… We still did it. He asked me out to dinner one day after work, I somehow said yes, then had perhaps the best night of my life. While I was always so concerned with my career and my tunnel vision had been set on getting me to the BAU, I didn’t realize until Hotch came along just how much of my life I had missed out on. I had let the idea of love and family entirely pass through one ear and out the other for years until Hotch asked me out and I started to reconsider everything.

I met Jack early on in our relationship. About three months in, to be more specific. Hotch and his wife had been divorced for a bit, and he only got to see Jack occasionally. I didn’t realize this, however, until I made the mistake of dropping by on a random Saturday night without any warning to see what Hotch was up to. We had just gotten home from a case, and my sister asked me to go to dinner with her, but I turned it down to go home and rest. But as I laid down in my bed in my apartment, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the case, I couldn’t help but think about being with Hotch. So I decided I’d pay him a visit. The shock of it all, though, was when he opened the door while holding Jack in one arm.

I tried to apologize and leave, but Hotch insisted that it was alright and invited me in for dinner. Jack was oblivious to the tension in my shoulders as he played with his toys on the carpet and I watched from the couch. Hotch was in the kitchen, still cooking up a storm, and I counted the minutes until he would return.

It wasn’t like I didn’t like kids. I loved them. Since I began dating Hotch, I had even thought about having kids of my own someday— which was something I had never once considered before. And the truth was, I thought that Jack was the cutest kid I had ever seen in my life. But I felt like I had just burst into something that I wasn’t supposed to see or know about, and now I didn’t know what to do with the information or the situation in front of me. For a profiler, I was really struggling to read Hotch and what he actually wanted me to do about all of this. Did he want me to actually leave, but he was just trying to be polite? Did he want me to keep him company in the kitchen? Did he want me to stay where I was and keep an eye on Jack?

I just felt so out of my element.

Jack looked up at the coffee table to spot one of his toys, then looked up at me before asking for me to hand it to him. I raised a brow and pointed to myself, as if to ask if he meant for someone else to help him, despite the fact that I was the only one there. He nodded, pointed, and asked again. I agreed by grabbing the toy and walking it over to him. As Jack took the toy from me, I decided to sit with him and watch him play with the toy trucks and cars.

“Which one’s your favorite?” I asked.

Jack crashed a cement truck into a Hot Wheels vehicle while simulating the sound of the accident with his mouth. When the imaginary collision and explosion had concluded, he picked up another Hot Wheels car and handed it to me. It was bright, neon green with black flames running down the sides of it, and on the hood it had a black skull.

“Ah, cool,” I complimented while handing it back.

“Which one is your favorite?” he asked me.

I looked down at the different toys scattered around him. There was everything from toy cars to plastic soldier men, dinosaurs, lego pieces and figures, and so on. I picked up the red triceratops and inspected it. “I like this one a lot.”

He smiled and took the dinosaur from my hands, “That’s my favorite dinosaur, too.”

I smiled. I was about to ask him if I could play with him before we heard Hotch clear his throat from the doorway. He was standing there in an apron, a smile on his face; and I realized that he had been watching. For how long, I was unsure. But he had been watching. He tried to wipe off his smile slyly before telling us that dinner was ready. Jack threw his toys to the side and jumped up, then ran to the dining room. Hotch’s smile returned when it was just the two of us.

“What are you so smiling about, _Agent Hotchner_?”

“You,” he answered nearly too quickly. “He likes you.”

“He’s a good kid. I think I might like him a little more than his dad.” We both chuckled as I pushed myself to my feet. “I’m sorry for bursting in like this. I didn’t realize that you had him tonight.”

“Stop apologizing. I’m happy that you’re here. I’m always happy when you’re here.”

“Flattery will not win you top spot in my book again, Mr. Hotchner. That boy has stolen my heart, and I’m afraid that there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Hotch’s eyes followed me as I passed him and walked into the dining room. He was still grinning as he entered the dining room after me and hurried over to pull my chair out for me. I quietly thanked him before sitting down and letting him help me push the chair back in. Jack was already reaching for the bowl of spaghetti in the middle of the table before Hotch even got the chance to sit down.

* * *

After dinner, I helped Hotch pick up and clean everything while Jack went back to the living room to keep playing. Hotch washed the dishes before handing them to me for drying or to stack in the dishwasher. We talked about work, which was usual, but what was great about all of this was the fact that we had the next two weeks off. Elle and Morgan were leaving in the morning for Jamaica, Gideon was off to a cabin in the woods, and Hotch and I were just planning on staying at home the entire time. We talked about how excited we were to have some time off, to just live our lives and breathe for a bit. We loved our job, there was no denying it, but we hardly ever got any breaks, considering that the job was so demanding of our time and energy.

I asked him what he was going to do while stuck at home for two weeks, and he answered with: “Chores. I’d like to just be a father for once, you know? Maybe clean out the attic and garage. Spend as much time with Jack as I can. What about you?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead, if I’m being honest. Elle had asked me to go with her and Morgan to Jamaica, but I turned it down—”

“Why?”

“Guess,” I teased. Hotch smiled down at the plate in his hand. I pushed myself up onto the counter and sat down with my legs dangling over the open dishwasher. “You’ve smiled more tonight than I’ve ever seen you smile before.” I knew why, of course. It didn’t take being a profiler to understand why Hotch was the happiest he had been in a very long time. Obviously, I didn’t want to take the credit. I didn’t want to be that confident in assuming that it was all because of me, but one glance at his eyes and I could see the way he looked at me and how his whole face would brighten up. It was, in fact, hard to _not_ notice. “It’s too bad that Jack is now my favorite, I suppose.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked, holding back a chuckle. I nodded and let my ankle run over the outside of his thigh. He noticed the touch and also noticed that it wasn’t an accident. “Well, if you love him so much, you can be the one to take him up to bed.”

I laughed, “Fine.” My ankle touched his leg again, but this time he caught it with a gentle grip. I froze. I thought about pulling back or maybe playfully kicking away his hand, yet I didn’t move. Instead, I sat on the counter, watching as his thumb caressed my ankle. His touch ran shivers up my entire body. “Your hands are cold.”

“They’re still wet.”

I gulped. I watched him for another fleeting moment before smoothly pulling my leg away so that I could jump off of the counter. I leaned up on my tip-toes and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

He caught my chin between his thumb and index finger before kissing me. I tried not to melt into his touch and kiss. “Don’t be long.”

Our gazes stayed glued to one another for a moment before Hotch’s fingers fell from my chin. My heart jumped as I took a step towards the door and left to take Jack upstairs for bed. By the time I came back, Hotch had put all of the toys left in the living room back in their assigned boxes and was now relaxing on the sofa while looking through an old photo album. I snuck up behind him carefully, then tapped his right shoulder and waited for him to look in that direction before leaning over his left shoulder and kissed his cheek.

“Sneaky,” he said. I grinned and walked around the sofa. “Did he give you any trouble?”

“He wanted me to read Goodnight Moon three times, but other than that, he was perfect.”

Hotch scoffed, “Usually he makes us read it to him five times. Count yourself lucky.”

I sat next to him and sighed with relief as I began to take off my heels. “What are you looking at?”

“My high school photo album.”

“Ooh, don’t be shy, share with the class.” I reclined back and to the side until my head met his shoulder and my back was pressed against the cushions. Hotch turned the book ever so slightly so that I could look through the images with him. I pointed at one of the pictures of him and the rest of the drama club. “Who would’ve known that Aaron Hotchner was a theater kid.” Hotch’s shoulders shook slightly as he chuckled shortly. “That’s quite the outfit.”

“What can I say? I had impeccable taste back then.”

“Clearly.”

Hotch flipped the page again and we continued to skim and joke. I would tease him about his hair or his dorky smile while he tried to insist that I was probably just as dorky looking in high school. I told him that he’d never know because I would have rather burned the pictures than let him take a look. My high school photos were _embarrassing_. Much more than his. He was enjoying the time we spent looking through his old album, but I knew that I’d be burning pink with anxiety if he ever decided to look at mine.

Once we reached the end of the book, Hotch closed it and set it on the table to his right. After, when he was situated again, he threw his arm over my back and laid his hand on my hip. His fingers started tapping to a beat in his head as we sat in silence for a moment.

“I love you,” I whispered.

Hotch’s fingers stopped dancing on me as he froze in place. He registered what I said, then responded with, “What?”

That wasn’t a good sign. I sat up and quickly looked at him to realize that he was genuinely confused. He wasn’t feigning it to hear it again or make sure I meant it. He seemed like he didn’t understand. Perhaps I made a mistake. So I started to backpedal. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s late… I should be going.” I leaned forward, my chest touching my knees, and I grabbed my shoes from under the table. I was trying to hurry. I didn’t want to be there any longer after having embarrassed myself with my slip up.

“Wait—“ Hotch insisted, grabbing my arm gently. I turned back to him and let him pull me back close to him. “You don’t have to leave,” he explained while tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I love you, too, Y/N.” His hand cupped the side of my neck carefully. He started to lean in while bringing me closer, too. He pressed his lips to mine, then, when I didn’t pull back, his hand moved from my neck to my cheek. 

I leaned into his kiss, resting one of my palms on the other side of his body for balance. His other arm snaked around my back to hold and stabilize me further. I forgot about my shoes on the floor as I moved around to push myself on top of him. With my knees propped on either side of his waist, Hotch sat up straight to get comfortable before kissing me again and leading my hips to sit on him gently. My hands held his face now, while his arms hugged me tight.

“Aaron…” I mumbled against his lips.

He kissed me harder, a signal that he understood. Hotch’s arms slid away from my waist and his hands moved towards the front of my shirt. His fingers traced the seam of my v-neck, the pads of his fingers occasionally brushing against my skin. My breath hitched as I was well aware of what he was doing and where he was headed.

I accommodated his intentions by moving around his reach as he went to grab for the bottom hem of my shirt. I lifted my hands from his face and into the hair as he began to lift it up. When my shirt was off, my hands went to his tshirt and began to return the favor. While he threw my shirt to the side, I tugged to get rid of his until he was shirtless, too. I planted my hands against his chest for support before leaning in for another kiss.

Hotch fought to win what little dominance he had in the situation with his tongue while he battled with unclasping my bra while blind to what he was doing. I rolled my hips over his and he groaned into my mouth. I could feel how hard he was, and I was sure he knew how desperately I needed him. The second my bra was off and flung across the room, Hotch pulled his mouth from mine and moved to kiss my neck tenderly. My head fell back in order to give him clearer access to my exposed skin. I gasped when his lips wrapped around one of my nipples and one of his hands began to pinch and play with the other. I moaned out his name and ran my fingers through his long, soft black hair.

I rolled my hips again and both of our grips tensed in response to the electric feeling between us. His hips bucked up the next time, though. It was getting to him that I was still dominating, despite his attempts through kissing me with more roughness and passion, and with how he was quickly ridding me of my clothes first.

“Pants,” he whispered, bucking his hips again. I reached between us and started fiddling with his belt. He nibbled lovingly at the skin around my collarbone, likely leaving a hickey. When I got the belt unclasped and his pants undone, I reached through the layers of clothes he had on and took his length in my hand. He hissed against my skin, “Fuck.” I pumped my hand up and down every inch of him a few times, feeling how hard he was for me. He grabbed my hips and lifted me off of him. “Yours. Now.”

I stood and rushed to pull my pants off, nearly tripping over one of the pant legs at one point. Meanwhile, he lifted his hips off the couch and pushed his pants down to his ankles. When he looked back up, I was standing there in just my red underwear, waiting for him to say or do something. He swallowed hard at the sight, nearly speechless. He took a moment to stare while he regained the ability to speak.

“Come here,” he demanded.

Before I could step forward, he reached out and grabbed the outside of my left thigh and pulled me towards him. I stumbled a short step and giggled. Hotch’s hands grabbed, kneaded, and held my thighs firmly like they were puddy in his hands. When his lips kissed my pantyline, I stopped moving and bit my lip to suppress a moan. Then, before I knew it, he grabbed my panties and pulled them down with one foul swoop. I stepped out of them and moved to sit on him again.

Our lips connected once more as I rested my knees on either side of him, no clothes to stand in our way anymore. I pressed my forehead against his as I sat up a bit and lined the tip of his erection up with my dripping entrance.

He put his thumb and index finger on my chin again to raise my attention to his eyes. “I love you,” he said wholeheartedly.

“I love you…” I responded breathlessly as I slowly sat down on his cock.

Hotch’s mouth fell agape at the feeling, and I took the opportunity to kiss him passionately again. We weren’t rushing or being aggressive anymore. The way we kissed and connected was sensual and sincere, like we were trying to savor every moment before I started riding him. I gasped against his lips when he rolled his hips eagerly.

“Aaron. Fuck.”

My nails dug into his shoulders as I started to move faster. I rolled my hips side to side, in circles, in figure eights, all to feel him hitting every angle, every part where I needed to feel him most. He was so big. He always was. My thighs were already shaking and it was growing to be a challenge to keep lifting myself up and down on him without melting into a puddle of moans.

He caught on fairly fast and he wasn’t about to let me give out that fast. He might not have had the upper hand, but he certainly knew how to command me. So his hands grabbed my thighs again, this time more roughly, and he started to move me the way he wanted and the way I needed.

“Don’t stop,” he ordered. A whimper mixed with a moan escaped me. I was still shaking and I knew that I was close to cumming, but he didn’t relent. He kept me moving. “Shit,” he croaked, his forehead falling against my chest as he focused. He must have been close, too. His thumb was suddenly between us and on my clit. He was definitely close. “Y/N. I’m gonna cum—”

I kissed his head. “Cum in me,” I begged.

He let out an animalistic groan as his thumb worked harder on my clit. I cried out as I came around him. He moaned, his upward thrusts getting incredibly sloppy before he came in me. It took two final, rough, full pumps up into me for him to come down from his high. We both tried to catch our breaths as we sat there together, still connected at the hips.

Hotch picked his head up and looked at me. I smiled and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I love you, Aaron Hotchner.”

“Stay for the two weeks.” I raised a brow, he went to kiss my neck. “Stay with me.” I chuckled slightly in response. “I’m serious.”

My head was still spinning and my body was still shivering from my orgasm, yet there he was, asking for me to move in with him for at least two weeks. And we both knew that two weeks would turn into much more than that. I hadn’t expected this outcome when I first showed up at his house for the evening. I hadn’t even anticipated this would happen when I turned down Elle’s offer to go to Jamaica. Yet, somehow, it felt right.

“Okay,” I answered.

Hotch perked up. “I fucking love you.”


	4. THE FISHER KING

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Sexual assault triggers. Mentions of child pornography. Alluded rape. Please be careful reading if you have any such triggers!
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 1 Episode 22. Right after part three.

Aaron’s chest was warm as we cuddled together on the couch. After the night we just had, there was no way we were moving all the way up to the bedroom yet. We couldn’t even move to put on our clothes, to be fair. We had worn each other out to the point that we just collapsed on the sofa and finally fell asleep like that. I was tucked under his arm, trapped between his warm body and the back of the couch. My head lifted and fell as he breathed calmly in his sleep. It was enough to make me fall asleep only a few minutes after he did.

Just after I managed to fall asleep, the phone on the table behind our heads began to ring. I groaned, still forcing my eyes shut, and patted Hotch’s chest a few times until he woke up again. He sighed and reached for the phone, still half asleep himself. We weren’t expecting a call from the office, not since we were given the two weeks vacation for the team. I wasn’t sure who else would be calling so late at night, but I also knew that it wasn’t my place to know unless he wanted to tell me. So I just tried to fall back asleep as he answered.

“Hotchner.”

There was silence for a minute as he listened to the other end of the call. That meant that it certainly wasn’t from the office. If it had been, the call would’ve been short, and Hotch would have already been throwing my clothes at me and sorting for Jack to stay with someone. Yet, I could still feel Hotch’s chest and arms tensing, specifically when the arm draped over me pressed in to hold me close and safe.

“Who is this?” he asked.

His breath hitched and he didn’t move a muscle. I woke up entirely at the silent alarm his body was sending out. I looked up at his face to see how pale he was. My brows pressed in as curiosity struck me.

“What’s going on?” I asked, resting my chin on his peck.

“I don’t know.”

Hotch reached up again to put the phone back. He carefully moved, swinging his feet off the couch, lifting his arm off of me, and helping me sit up so that he had room to stand. I watched as he went to grab a piece of paper and a pen from a nearby drawer.

“Aaron. Who was that?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated while scribbling something down.

“What are you writing?”

“Just one second,” he insisted with a more strict, boss-like tone. I fell silent and pulled the blanket over my body. When he was done writing, Hotch picked up the paper and walked back over to me. He held out the paper for me and I took it eagerly. “That’s everything the guy said.”

“Don’t waste time on the first victims. They were unrepented bad men. She’s the important one. Remember, everything starts at the beginning. There won’t be much time. The youngest holds the key. You must help him save her. Take Agent Greenaway with you. Only the one you love, however. The other one is being dealt with.” I looked up at Hotch. “What is this supposed to mean?” He shrugged while picking up his clothes from the floor. “It could just be a joke. It’s probably just some kids messing around. Why call you when he could call Gideon or anyone else?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

“So then why are you so freaked out?”

“Because he knows that you’re here.”

“So?”

“That means he was watching.”

I looked over at the window. The translucent white curtains were pulled shut, but the opaque red ones were still wide open. Anyone on the street would have seen our shadows moving as one only a few minutes ago. My heartbeat sped up.

“Hotch,” I croaked. He looked at me as he buttoned up his shirt. “What did he mean when he said ‘the other one is being dealt with’?”

He took a moment to look at the panic on my face while he thought about all of the possibilities. He began to snap the buttons together faster, “I’ll call JJ and Garcia. Do me a favor, there’s a number on the fridge for Jack’s aunt. Call her for me and tell her to pick up Jack in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes?”

“She lives two blocks from here. She’ll be here just before we leave.”

I nodded and jumped off the couch. I grabbed my clothes and threw them on in a rush as I hopped my way to the kitchen. The number was on the fridge just like Hotch said it would be. I dialed and Jack’s aunt picked up after the first few rings. I apologized for calling so late and told her that Hotch needed her to pick Jack up in ten minutes, just as I was instructed to do. She sighed on the other end of the call before agreeing to come. I thanked her before hanging up then running back into the living room.

Hotch spun around as he hung up his cellphone and stuffed it in his pocket. “JJ says that Elle was just arrested in Jamaica as a murder suspect.”

“What?”

“She’s arranged for us to fly down there. You’ll meet with Morgan at the crime scene and I’ll get Elle out as soon as I can. Then we’ll come back and deal with our Unsub.”

“He’s an Unsub now?”

“What else would he be?”

“I… I don’t know.”

* * *

It was still dark out when Hotch and I got on our six hour flight to Jamaica. We had called Morgan just before take off, and he told us that the local police weren’t going to let him into the scene until a supervisor came by to actually clear him as an agent and not just some asshole trying to muck up a crime scene in order to protect a friend. Hotch sighed and said that we would be able to get him into the scene in the morning, but there wasn’t much else we could do from the plane. Morgan understood and said that he was going to head down to the police station to make sure that Elle was alright during questioning. We thanked him, Hotch hung up the phone, and we were off to Jamaica.

I always thought about visiting Jamaica. I think that was why Elle was so confused when I turned down her offer to go with her and Morgan. Afterall, she was my sister and he was one of my closest friends on the team, and the three of us would have a blast in paradise. But I wanted to stay home because I wanted to be close to Hotch— and maybe it was a good thing that I did stay home. Who knew if it could have been me instead of Elle sitting in Jamaican police custody.

When we landed in Jamaica, we headed straight to the resort that Elle and Morgan were staying at. We flashed our badges at the guards standing out front, and they looked to each other with confusion before letting us in. Morgan was standing in the hallway by the elevators on the floor where the body had been found. It was the same floor that he and Elle had been staying. We walked with him as he told us everything.

Him and Elle were at the beach all day, you know, as one does in Jamaica. Nothing was out of the ordinary. In fact, he went with some girls back to their room, and Elle went clubbing with a guy she met. Morgan thought that everything was fine until he came back to his room late at night to find that his floor had been taped off for the crime scene and Elle was practically being carried out of her room in her underwear by the police.

My blood boiled at that detail.

Morgan said that he tried to talk to the lead detective before calling Hotch, but she wouldn’t let him near the scene, even though he even showed his FBI badge. “She laughed in my face,” is how he explained her response to him. That was when he called and just had to wait for us to show up.

Hotch wasn’t too happy with being dragged down to the hotel when he was desperate to get over to the station to sort things out with Elle. But this detective was being a pain in his ass, and he needed to get us into the scene so that we could figure out who actually did this— because whoever _did_ do this was surely the same guy who called the house when we were sleeping. Right? There was no way the two incidents were connected, especially considering the Unsub mentioned that Elle was “being taken care of”. Was arresting Elle for murder “taking care of her” or did he have a grander plan?

“S.S.A Hotchner,” Aaron said, holding his badge up for the lead detective who met us outside the door of the crime scene, like she was anticipating our arrival. “Seeing as one of my agents is being accused, as her supervisor, I would like to have my team take a look at the scene and report back to me with any of their findings.”

The detective took Hotch’s badge to examine it closely. “You have ten minutes,” she told us, still reading his information.

Morgan and I looked to Hotch, who just nodded his head towards the door, a signal for us to go in. We pushed past Hotch and the detective and headed into the hotel room where the body was. Well, _part_ of a body. Laying on the bed was a decapitated, naked man. His arms were positioned into a T across the width of the bed, while his ankles were crossed over each other. Above him, painted on the wall in blood, it said: “SAVE HER”.

“Walk me through it again,” I told Morgan while putting on a pair of rubber gloves that the coroner had set down on a table in the corner.

Morgan walked around the other side of the bed to inspect the decapitation. “We were at the beach all day. A couple of girls caught my eye, so I wondered their way, but not too far that I couldn’t see Elle. She was tanning in the sun for a few minutes before a guy approached her and asked if she wanted to play volleyball with them. Before I left the beach, I made sure that Elle would be alright, and she told me that she was getting dinner and going clubbing with the guy she met. I know that she can handle herself,” he explained, leaning over the bed to get a better look at something, “so I left. When I came back to the hotel, I found that the police were already here.”

“What did they find and how did they find it? Why do they think that Elle has anything to do with this?”

I lifted the right shoulder of the victim to see if there were any marks on his back to indicate any kind of restraints or defensive wounds. The cut on his neck looked somewhat… old… not like you would find on a body that had just been decapitated the night before. That was concerning to me, but without our own corner or even Reid there to correct me, I couldn’t make any assumptions.

“The trail of blood in the hallway,” he pointed to the door, “it goes from the elevator to this room to Elle’s room. When the police burst into her room to arrest her, they found blood everywhere and another message written in blood that said, ‘It’s been handled.’ Whatever that means.”

“Shit,” I cursed under my breath.

Morgan raised a brow, “What?”

I realized that he heard the concern in my voice, but I wasn’t willing to give up the information about the phone call from the night prior yet. Hotch and I still hadn’t told anyone that we were together— and while it was entirely possible that they had their suspicions, we were waiting to tell the team until we knew that things were serious. And after last night, I was pretty sure that things were serious… But I knew that Hotch was still having a hard time after Haley, and it wasn’t easy for him to trust or fall in love again, and so I didn’t want to rush him. If he wanted to tell our alibi differently than how it actually went down, I wanted to give him that chance.

So I stood up straight and looked Morgan in the eyes. “Let’s look at Elle’s room.”

Morgan agreed, still eyeing me like he knew that something was off, but he couldn’t quite place his finger on it yet. He led me down a few doors to Elle’s hotel room. Well, he was right about the blood trailing right to her door and even inside. It was concerning that if Elle hadn’t done this— which I knew she hadn’t— then how did the Unsub get into her room and make it look like a blood bath without her noticing? I guessed that was why the police were so convinced it was her, and rightfully so. All of the evidence led to Elle, and without the inside perspective that Morgan and I had, this would’ve looked like an open and shut case. But FBI agents just didn’t go around brutally murdering anyone. Besides, if they did, they would likely be much smarter about it than leaving a blood trail right into their room. Elle was one of the smart ones. She wouldn’t have ever done such a thing.

Blood soaked the floors and everything around the bed to the point that we couldn’t even step into the room without proper gear, which we didn’t have. And just as Morgan stated in the other room, another message had been painted onto Elle’s wall, just above her headboard. To tell the truth, it didn’t look good. If she weren’t my sister, and she weren’t apart of the BAU, and the Jamaican police had called us down to help close the case, I would’ve said that it was Elle, too. All of the evidence led to her. Well, maybe. Our last hope was any prints, hairs, the Unsub’s blood, etc. Literally any kind of physical evidence that could clear my sister.

“There were no prints,” Morgan responded when I asked. “Not a single hair, no dirt under the nails of the victim, and there’s too much blood to go through all of it to tell what’s what.”

“So we’re pretty much fucked.”

Morgan nodded, “Yeah.”

“Find anything of interest, agents?” the detective asked, sneaking up behind us.

Morgan and I turned to her.

“How did your officers know to come looking in this building for a murder?” I asked.

“My men got a call about eight hours ago from the front desk of the resort, saying that an anonymous man called them to tell them that there was a murder on this floor.”

“So he called the hotel clerk instead of the police,” I told Morgan.

“He?” the detective questioned.

“If someone had come up here to see blood all over the walls, and was suspicious of there having been a murder in one of the rooms, they wouldn’t just calmly go call the front desk. No, they would scream, call the cops, run for help. Literally anything other than stay calm and call hotel management.”

Morgan’s cousin— the one who managed the resort, got them the discount on their rooms for the two weeks, and received the call from the Unsub— walked up to us in a hurry. “The man who rented the other room was named Marty Harris. He checked in a couple of days ago with another man named Frank Giles, and he took the adjoining room.”

Morgan and I pushed past his cousin and the detective and hurried to the crime scene. Morgan fiddled with the door handle that led to the other room, but it was locked from the other side, and there was no time to wait for a key. Morgan took a step back, gathered his strength, then kicked the door in. We pressed into the room, hoping to find Frank Giles, but there was no one there. We searched the entire room and the bathroom, but it was empty, and everything looked untouched. The bed was made perfectly, the chair at the desk was positioned correctly, fresh towels were hanging on the bars, and the complimentary soaps were still in the bathroom. Frank Giles likely never even stepped foot into that room.

“He’s gone,” Morgan stated the obvious. “Let me call Garcia, see if we can find anything about this Giles guy. Call Hotch and see if those Bureau lawyers ever showed up.”

“I nodded an agreement, “Alright,” and headed back through the crime scene and into the bloody hallway. I dialed Hotch’s number and it rang a couple of times before he finally picked up. “Any news?”

“The lawyers arrived a few minutes ago. They’re going to meet me at the police station. What did you guys find?”

“Blood. Lots and lots of blood. The trail starts at the elevators, leads to the crime scene, then to Elle’s room. It was like someone wanted the body to be found and for it to be connected to Elle.”

“Think it’s the same guy from last night?”

“I think so. He wrote on the walls with blood in both rooms. In the victim’s room, he wrote ‘SAVE HER’ and in Elle’s room, he wrote ‘IT’S BEEN HANDLED’. When I looked at the body, he was left almost like Jesus on the cross, and the decapitation wound looked old.”

“Old?”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Hotch, I think this guy has been dead for at least a few days.”

“Go with the coroner and see if they can give you a time of death. If anything, we’ll just have to fly a specialist down here.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“I know, but it’s the best I can do. Take Morgan with you, then come down to the station as soon as you can.”

“Alright.”

“Hey, Y/N?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

I smiled against the phone. “I lov—”

“Greenaway, let’s get out of here,” Morgan said, joining me in the hallway.

I paused and thought about how I wanted to tell Hotch that I loved him, too, but Morgan was still standing there, waiting for me to hang up. “I’ll see you later,” I told Hotch before quickly hanging up the phone and stuffing it in my back pocket. “He wants us to go with the coroner to get a T.O.D.”

Morgan sighed. He looked so tired, and I was sure that he hadn’t slept in at least twenty-four hours. But were we supposed to do? There was only so much time we had left to get Elle out of jail and head back to Quantico. There were still things that needed to be sorted when it came to the phone call we got, and how it could possibly be connected to Elle’s situation, 

We followed the coroner to the morgue and waited outside the autopsy room as they completed an entire investigation. I was sitting with my phone in the hands, praying for a call from either Hotch or Elle to tell me that everything was alright and that we could finally just go home and not worry about this anymore. But no such call came.

Once the autopsy was done, the coroner came out while still dressed in a surgical gown and scrubs. They pulled off their bloodied gloves carefully as they explained to us that my hypothesis was correct. Marty Harris had been murdered prior to Elle and Morgan’s arrival to Jamaica. The neck wound was old, yes, but that wasn’t enough to prove anything until he searched the contents of the stomach and only found a meal that Harris had consumed two days before.

I immediately called Hotch on our way to the car and told him everything. Hotch told me and Morgan to meet him at the airport. He hung up first to go tell the lawyers, who would then go tell the Jamaican police and demand Elle be released at once. This was good news. It meant that we could finally get the hell out of Jamaica, which was all I wanted. I was starting to think about how I always wished I could go on vacation there, but now that I had been there because of my sister’s arrest, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of ever returning.

* * *

Hotch drove us to Quantico after we landed in mid-afternoon. By the time we had left the house last night, gotten to the jet, and flown to Jamaica, it was around six in the morning there. Then, from landing to arriving at the hotel, going through the crime scenes with Morgan, waiting for the autopsy results, then getting Elle out of jail, it was about three in the afternoon, Virginia time.

We had all been through a lot in only a few hours, so I was surprised that Hotch didn’t send Elle and Morgan straight home. Instead, he took us all the way to Quantico, and waited until we were walking _into_ the BAU to _ask_ if they wanted to go home and rest. And what did they say? No. Of course. Both of them were the most stubborn out of everyone on the team, and they didn’t appreciate that their vacation had been fucked with, so they wanted to stay and find the bastard who did this to them. Elle, most of all, wanted answers, understandably— which was why Hotch decided to not fight her on it.

She wanted to start with the lead that Morgan and I found at the hotel. While on the plane, we told Hotch and Elle everything we saw and leaned. When she had been pulled from her bed in the middle of the night, Elle couldn’t even see what had happened, nor did she get an explanation. So she was rightfully unsettled by the fact that someone had broken into her room in the middle of the night and made it look like the elevator doors in The Shining exploded in her room.

“How do we even find this Frank Giles?” Elle asked, pushing the glass doors to the BAU open for us.

“Already done,” JJ said, coming down the ramp from her office. “He flew out of Montego Bay last night on a red eye— just before you were arrested— and he flew to Virginia.”

“Virginia?” Morgan questioned, just as shocked as the rest of us. “You mean that he’s from here?”

JJ shrugged and handed us case files, “It doesn’t look like he’s from here, no; but he’s here now, at least. And he’s got a huge rap sheet, so we should be able to find him fairly quickly.”

“And what about the victim?” Hotch asked.

“Marty Harris,” JJ hummed, flipping a few pages over to find his record, “was a registered sex offender and had been arrested twice for robbery.”

“And that’s the head that showed up at my cabin last night,” Gideon sighed, coming over to us. “I just got the call that they identified him.”

We were all on the move towards the boardroom. We needed to regroup there while we waited for Reid to fly back from Las Vegas, where he was visiting family.

“So… what? Giles cuts off Harris’s head, ships it from Jamaica to Gideon’s cabin, and blames it all on Elle? Why?” I questioned.

Hotch pulled out the piece of paper he wrote on last night after we got the call from the Unsub. He unraveled it and began reading, “Don’t waste time on the first victims. They were unrepented bad men. She’s the important one. Remember, everything starts at the beginning. There won’t be much time. The youngest holds the key. You must help him save her.” He folded the paper again before he could read the last bit about me.

“What’s that?” Elle asked, setting her bags down on the couch.

“I got a call last night before you called from Jamaica,” Hotch answered, taking a seat at the table.

“Any mention of a ‘her’?”

“You must help him save her.”

Everyone else sat down, too. Not Elle, though. She kept pacing around the room, her mind working overtime to figure this out. I knew that she wouldn’t have cared as much if this guy had gone after someone else. But he chose her, and it was personal now.

“Can I read it?” Gideon asked.

Hotch tensed. “No.” Everyone raised a curious brow at him. “Sorry, I just… My handwriting is horrible, you wouldn’t be able to read it.”

JJ changed the subject first, “Let’s review, where was everyone last night?”

“My cabin in the woods,” Gideon answered, leaning back but still eyeing Hotch. “And I got the wonderful gift of a man’s head and a 1963 Nellie Fox baseball card.”

“Elle and I were in Jamaica,” Morgan said. “We were blessed with one mess of a crime scene and a trip down to the Jamaican police headquarters.”

“Reid was in Vegas with his family,” Elle added.

“We don’t know what he got— if anything,” JJ said, “but a shadow box with a rare butterfly and a note inside was delivered to my office this morning.”

“I was at home,” Hotch said. “Got a phone call.”

It was all down to me. Where was I? What was I doing? Did I receive anything like the others had? I couldn’t tell them that I was with Hotch, right? I mean, it wasn’t against policy for us to be dating. Yeah, it was Gideon’s general rule that he didn’t like dating within the team, but it wasn’t like we could get in trouble or lose our jobs. The issue was that I didn’t know if Hotch was ready for people to know yet. Haley likely knew now since I was the one who had to call Jack’s aunt, and she saw me with Hotch when she came to pick him up. But these were our work friends, the people we saw most of all. In a way, they were our family. Telling them was a huge step in our relationship— more so than saying “I love you” for the first time.

So I had to lie. “I was at home.”

“How did you get to the jet so fast with Hotch, then?” Morgan pried. He knew something was up. He had guessed back in Jamaica, but chose to not say anything until the time was right. He had caught me in my lie and was calling me out in front of everyone.

“I— Hotch called me to tell me that my sister had been arrested.”

“You live thirty minutes away from here if you’re speeding down every road,” Elle commented, also catching on that something was off. “The flight log said that you guys took off only twenty-three minutes after getting the phone call from Morgan.”

“Hotch lives just down the road. He’s the closest out of all of us,” Morgan clarified Elle’s point. They were teaming up on me now. Great. “You wouldn’t have been able to get here on time if you came from your house.”

“What does it matter, Morgan?” I questioned roughly, trying my best to deflect.

“We’ve got a psychopath who’s taunting us, and you won’t tell us where you were. How are we supposed to put the pieces together if you won’t tell us the truth—”

“They were with me,” Hotch admitted. The whole room fell into an uncomfortable silence. “They came over to have dinner with me and Jack. We got the call…” He took a moment to find the right words to explain what we were doing without actually having to say it. “We got the call when we were asleep.” My eyes fluttered as I tried to look at anything around the room but the team. Hotch pulled the note out again and read it in its entirety. “Don’t waste time on the first victims. They were unrepented bad men. She’s the important one. Remember, everything starts at the beginning. There won’t be much time. The youngest holds the key. You must help him save her. Take Agent Greenaway with you. Only the one you love, however. The other one is being dealt with.”

“Love?” Elle chuckled quietly. She couldn’t believe that I had kept this secret from her. She couldn’t believe that I had been dating Hotch all this time and not a single one of them knew about it. It almost made her mad.

“He watched us last night. He knew that we were together and he knew that…” He hesitated again. “He knew that we had just had a certain conversation, which is why he said what he said about taking Y/N with me— whatever that means— instead of Elle.”

“So the call was for both of you, but for different reasons. He told you, Hotch, that you need to ‘help him save her’ and he told you, Y/N, that you’re supposed to go with Hotch somewhere. Now we just have to figure out who the ‘her’ is and where you two are supposed to go.”

“Reid just texted. He landed and he says that he received a skeleton key,” JJ said, looking up from her phone.

“The youngest holds the key,” Hotch quoted.

“There’s something else,” Gideon said, leaning forward after getting lost in thought for a minute. “Nellie Fox was my favorite player on the 1959 White Sox lineup. My father took me to nearly every game that year. So is it coincidence or did he know that about me?”

“Wait…” JJ whispered. She started pushing all of her papers to the side in search of something. She picked up the shadow box that was sent to her and turned it around for us to see. “I used to collect butterflies when I was a little girl. That’s how I knew what kind of butterfly was in the box.”

“So, then, he knows us,” Morgan shrugged. “He knows where Hotch lives, he knew that Y/N was with him, he knows about Gideon’s childhood hero, JJ’s hobby as a kid, and where Elle and I went on vacation. How?”

“Because that’s all listed in the FBI database,” Garcia said shyly as she stepped into the boardroom.

Garcia was never shy. Never. She was always the bubbliest out of all of us. She always came to work with a smile, and she always had a good attitude about everything, even when some of the cases were taking a toll on us. Garcia being quiet was like fire being cold to the touch. It just didn’t make any sense. So not only was something wrong with the entire field team, but now something was going on with Garcia, too. Had the Unsub done something to her? Had he done the one thing that could possibly mortify her? And if so, what was it?

“He hacked me,” she admitted, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“How?” Morgan asked worriedly. He was always protective of Garcia. The two of them were the closest out of everyone on the team. When she was upset, he was upset. When she was happy, he was happy. Since she was clearly in distress, he had jumped into protective mode. “Garcia, how did he do this?”

She looked at the floor for a moment. She was ashamed of the truth. She didn’t want to tell us in the same way that Hotch and I didn’t want to admit where I had been. Garcia sniffled, “I was playing an online video game… He got in through there.”

Gideon sighed with disappointment, and everyone cringed slightly. So that was why Garcia was upset. She knew that she had fucked up and she was scared to admit it. I didn’t blame her, honestly. It was like when I thought that Hotch hated me… It ate up inside because I respected him and I cared about what he thought of me. When it came to Garcia, we were the only family she had. She couldn’t afford to think or know that we were disappointed in her or hated her. So, of course, she was ashamed.

“But I found him. His name is Frank Giles, and he lives four miles from here.” Garcia handed the information to Hotch, not knowing that we already had Giles’s file.

“Garcia, you’re sure that it was Giles?” Morgan asked.

She nodded vigorously. She didn’t understand why we were all scrambling to our feet and rushing for the door. For all she knew, someone could have just died; when, in reality, she gave us every reason to go after this son of a bitch. He just hacked the FBI. We didn’t have anything on him for the murder in Jamaica, but we could get him for this.

The SWAT team went in first, just before Morgan and Elle, who were leading our team inside. Giles was living in a building that was going to be demolished in the two months, meaning that nearly every occupant except for him and one other family on another floor had moved out already. The building looked practically abandoned from the outside— and even on the inside as we started storming up the flights of stairs.

Morgan kicked down Giles’s front door before even knocking or calling out his name. There was no one in the living room, so the team moved into position in front of the closed doors that led to the bedroom. Morgan looked to the SWAT team, then to Hotch and I behind him. Hotch gave the signal, which was a slight nod, and Morgan kicked in this door, too.

“Frank Giles! FBI!” Morgan exclaimed, rushing into the room.

We all followed in, but not as fast as we saw what was in the room. Frank Giles was there, yeah. But not in the way we had expected. He was dead on his bed— which was really the only thing in the bedroom at all. It wasn’t even on a boxspring or a bedframe. It was literally just the mattress with no sheets or a pillow. A mattress and Giles’s dead body pinned to it with a greatsword that you would see in a medieval setting. Above his body, painted on the wall with blood, just like in Jamaica, was a riddle that read: HERE THY QUEST DOTH TRULY BEGIN.

I pulled my vest off so that I could move around the scene easier. Hotch and Gideon called in the forensics team, which included the coroner, who handed out gloves to me, Morgan, and Elle. Morgan immediately went to investigate the duffle bag sitting on the floor to our right, while Elle went to investigate the blood on the wall, and I crouched down side the body to get a better look at what we were dealing with.

Morgan held up two stacks of cash that he had pulled from the duffle bag and showed it to Hotch and Gideon. There must have been thousands of dollars inside of that bag, which meant that our Unsub had paid Giles to go down to Jamaica, kill Harris, then pin the blame on Elle to make sure she was out of the way, for some unknown reason. When Giles returned from Jamaica, our Unsub didn’t want any strings, so he lured Giles in with the promise of payment, then killed him.

“He was strangled,” I said just as the coroner came in. She sat down with me to take a look at my evidence. “The bruises on his neck and the swelling of the glands.” She nodded and started writing down some notes. Hotch crouched down across from us to get a better look, too. “So he was strangled, but there are no defensive wounds. After he was dead, the Unsub came back and pierced his chest with the sword.”

“But why a sword? Elle queried.

“It goes with the motif of medieval times,” Morgan guessed.

“Yeah, but he hasn’t done this until now. Why start phrasing things like this?”

“Because he wasn’t the one sending the messages in Jamaica or to Hotch’s house. Giles did that. Our Unsub sees this as a roleplaying game of some kind. He gives Spencer a key and the rest of us have a quest of some kind to complete. And he’s the ultimate villain,” I said.

“There’s something etched on the sword,” the coroner spoke up.

Hotch leaned in to read it, “To learn of what should be done, leave the blade ‘til the hour is none.”

“Hour be none? Leave the blade? What’s this guy on about?” Morgan questioned, crouching down, too. We were all huddled around the body now.

“He means 3PM,” Spencer answered. “The days used to be broken into hourly intervals, the canonical hours of the breviary. Prime was 6AM, Terce was 9AM, Sext was noon, None was 3PM, and Vespers was 6PM. It was a medieval way of telling time.”

“Medieval,” Gideon repeated with a slight chuckle. “Everything this guy does is a clue.”

“So, what do we do? Wait until 3PM tomorrow? We don’t have that kind of time. Especially when there’s a ‘her’ out there that we need to be looking for.” Morgan pushed himself to his feet.

Reid put his bag down in the corner. “No, no, no. We don’t have to do that. If we have a flashlight, we can imitate where the sun would be at 3PM to figure out what he wants us to be looking for.”

I pulled the flashlight from my FBI raincoat and handed it to him. He thanked me before squatting in the corner with the light on. The coroner and I moved out of his way. As Reid started to move the light up the wall in the same way that the sun would be, Morgan moved the duffle bag out of the way so that he could start tapping against the wall for a rip in the wallpaper or maybe even a hole behind it with another clue. Morgan tapped down the wall slowly, following the shadow of the sword until he found something of interest.

“It’s hollow,” he told us, knocking on the different parts of the wall to show us the sound difference. He pulled out his knife and started cutting into the wallpaper. When he pulled the wallpaper back, it revealed a box that had been shoved into a square space in the wall. “It has Y/N’s name on it.”

I scrunched my brows and approached to see what the hell he was talking about. “What the fuck…” I cursed under my breath, taking the box from Morgan. He eyed me suspiciously as I investigated it.

I could’ve sworn it was my jewelry box that I had growing up. The very same one. But how was that possible? I brought it with me to Virginia when I moved out of my parents’ house. It was in my apartment just yesterday before I left to go over to Hotch’s house. My heart fell to my stomach and I felt like I was going to be sick. The same engraving I had carved into it when I was a kid was on the bottom. It _was_ mine. This son of a bitch broke into my house and stole my jewelry box. The only thing that had thrown me for a loop, which made me originally consider that it wasn't mine, but was instead a replica, was the fact that it had a lock on it. But once I saw the engraving, I knew that it was mine.

“How did he get this?” I croaked, turning it over in my hands.

“Get what?” Hotch asked.

“Elle bought me a jewelry box for my eleventh birthday. We carved our initials into the bottom of it so that I would always have something of her, no matter where I would move or what I would end up doing with my life.” I held the box up for Elle to see, and she looked as pale as I surely did. “He got this from my apartment.”

“Do you have the key?” Morgan took the box back from me.

I shook my head, “No. It never had a lock on it.”

“The youngest holds the key,” Gideon spoke up. He was right. The Unsub had made it perfectly clear that Reid had a key, and we weren’t sure what it was for, but now it was entirely possible that this was its purpose. “Give it a shot.”

Reid hurried over, digging in all of his pockets to find the key. Morgan held the box steady as Reid penetrated the lock with the key and turned. The lock popped and released its hold on the box. He carefully opened it, possibly worried that there could be a bomb trigger connected to the lid, that would send us all sky high if he wasn’t too careful. When the coast was clear, though, he opened it all the way and a song began playing.

I had to sit down on the floor. “That wasn’t there before… That song… It was different when Elle gave it to me… I used to listen to it every night to help me sleep.” My head was spinning. How was this happening? _Why_ was this happening?

“It’s called The Trout Quintet by Franz Schubert,” Gideon explained.

There was a note inside that Reid picked up to read. “Never would it be night, but always clear day to any man’s sight.”

“There’s something else,” Morgan said, pulling at something inside of the box.

There was a tab on the lid of the box, which, when pulled down, revealed a hidden space. As it opened, it revealed a CD labeled: THY QUEST, and it had a lack of string pulled through the center circle of the disc. I hid my face between my knees as I tried to calm down. I was rocking back and forth, trying to understand all of this. I didn’t have any personal stake in this until now. Even when Elle was arrested and the Unsub knew that I was at Hotch’s house and we said “I love you” for the first time, I wasn’t bothered. Every Unsub is a sicko and can get to us one way or another. But _this_ …

Hotch’s hand started rubbing soft circles over my back to try to ease my nerves. I kept my head down as I tried to explain why that freaked me out so badly, but I couldn’t find the words. He was trying to soothe me with a calm hush as the others analyzed the new evidence.

I took in a deep breath. “I used to hide things in there when I was in high school. Cocaine, joints, list of boys that I liked. No one knew about it. The day after I graduated, some kid sent instant photos to my house of me at a party with my top off… He said that if I didn’t give him a certain amount of money, he’d send the copies to everyone I knew. Those pictures would have ruined my scholarship and my chances of getting into the FBI. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have any money, so I just gave him everything that was in the jewelry box. He said that there weren’t any other copies and that I could keep the photos. I didn’t know what else to do with them but hide them, so I put them in my jewelry box. It’s been so long, I forgot they were even there.” I was going to be sick. Some twisted motherfucker out there had those pictures of me, and he was probably enjoying them as we were talking about them. “Oh, god…”

“We’ve gotta take a look at what’s on this disc,” Hotch insisted to the rest of the team while still trying to console me. I prayed that it wasn’t digital copies of the photos. Anything but that. I might have actually preferred a literal sex tape compared to those pictures. “Let’s bag everything and get back to the office.” Everyone concurred and started to do as they were told. Hotch moved closer to me and whispered, “You’ve gotta stand up.”

“He has those pictures of me, Hotch.”

“I know—”

“They weren’t just topless photos,” I whispered back.

I didn’t want Elle to ever know the truth. If she thought that they were just a few silly photos of me dancing half naked on a table while drunk at a high school party, that was fine. But the truth was worse. The truth was worse than that or even a sex tape. I was in high school. I was just a kid. When it happened, I didn’t understand it, I guessed. But in my line of work, when we would take cases eerily similar all the time, I knew. I knew the truth now. I wasn’t blind. That was what made it so mortifying, though. That was why I was so terrified of him having those photos. While they had left my mind due to suppression of bad memories, this Unsub was likely finding pleasure from them.

Hotch grabbed my hand, “You have to get up, though.”

He understood why I was panicking, and he certainly felt bad for having to pressure me out of feeling that, but we couldn’t afford this right then. There was a lock of some girl’s hair connected to that disc, and we were being told that it was our quest. I could guess that the quest was finding this poor girl, if she wasn’t already dead. Our top priority had to be searching for her, not some guy who stole my high school trauma.

I leaned into Hotch as we both stood. “We’re going to get this son of a bitch, okay?” he whispered, still trying not to draw any attention to us.

We had done so well hiding our relationship. We kept our distance at work, we tried to not favor one another, and we certainly didn’t touch. But now he was going out of his way to touch me and be close to me just to make sure I was alright. The feeling of him being by my side gave me enough comfort to the point that I could slow my breathing and stop the world from spinning around me.

* * *

Back at the office, Garcia played the disc for us on the DVD player. I was still shaken up and pale, despite how many times I had washed my face, and how many bottles of water Elle brought over to me. My mind was racing with only the memories of that night and what this Unsub could possibly be doing with those images. The video started, but I was still staring directly at the empty wall space just beneath the TV.

Morgan and Hotch’s voices sounded muffled to me, like they were underwater or stuck behind glass. I couldn’t understand them, and I wasn’t trying to either. I was just… staring and thinking. Then the Unsub started talking.

“Welcome, members of the Behavior Analysis Unit. Welcome. By now, you should know that you’re on a quest to find this girl. Beautiful, isn’t she? Beautiful, but in distress and in need of your help. Her life depends on the success of your quest. In order to complete this quest, however, you must follow my rules. They aren’t complicated, and they aren’t long; so listen closely. The first rule is that only the members of your team can participate in the quest. Jason Gideon, Aaron Hotchner, Y/N Greenaway, Elle Greenaway, Derek Morgan, Spencer Reid, Jennifer Jareau, and Penelope Garcia are the only ones cleared to participate. No outside resources and no media. The second rule is just as simple… Aaron Hotchner _must_ follow my instructions given last night. Without obeying those instructions, your quest will fail. See? Simple. No worries at all. Now, you will be receiving an item soon that will hold the final clue you need to complete your quest. You will also need a book, which has inspired many an adventure like mine. Believe me when I mean that I hope to see you all soon, as it means that this quest has reached a successful end for all of us.” The video cut out the second he was done speaking.

The entire team started talking and hypothesizing again, but it still sounded all so distant. The Unsub’s voice was ringing in my ears, every word echoing through my body. He had gotten to me. He did it. He took something from me just so that he could gain something for himself. Wait— Gain something for himself.

“He wants something in return,” I interrupted. They all fell silent to listen. “He said that he hopes to see us soon because it means that the quest will have been a success for us all. That includes himself. If he just wanted to fuck with us, he wouldn’t have included himself. He has personal stakes in this— That’s why he wanted _our_ attention. He knows that whatever it is that he wants, we can get it for him

—”

“Agent Hotchner,” Agent Anderson said, bursting into the room, “there’s someone here to see you.”

“Who is it?” he interrogated.

“I think it’s your son and his aunt? At least that’s what she said.”

“Jack…”

I scrambled to my feet with Hotch, both of us running for the door. Hotch pushed Anderson out of the way and we ran down the ramp and into the maze of cubicles where Jack’s aunt was standing, holding holding hand, both of them looking around for Hotch. I slowed down as relief washed over me when I saw that they both seemed fine. After everything that had happened so far, I wouldn’t have held it past our Unsub to take Jack. In fact, I didn’t hold a single thing past him.

Hotch ran up to her while I stayed a few steps back. “What are you doing here, Jessica? Is everything alright?”

“We’re fine. I tried calling you, but you haven’t been answering your cell,” she explained, letting go of Jack’s hand.

He hurried over to me with his stubby little feet and started pulling on one of my pant legs. I reached down to pick him up. “What’s going on, little man?”

“I brought your favorite dinosaur,” he said, waving the red triceratops in my face.

I laughed and took it from him, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” Jessica continued, catching my attention. “A strange man came to the door, said that I needed to give you this because a girl’s life depends on it.” She held up a large folder that she had brought with her and Jack.

Hotch looked over his shoulder at me and Jack for a moment before turning back to Jessica. “He came to the door?”

“We were at Haley’s place. She needed me to pick something up from there and bring it to her at work.” She turned the folder around to show Hotch the address, “It has Jack’s name on it.”

Jack waved his favorite car in front of my face now, “I brought this one, too. Can we play?”

My attention turned back to him while Hotch kept asking Jessica some questions about the man who came to the door. “Maybe in a bit, Jack, okay?”

Hotch was starting to freak Jessica out. I mean, it was one thing that the Unsub knew where Aaron lived, and it was also plausible if he followed Jessica home after we sent Jack away with her. But to address a folder of some kind to Jack and have it delivered straight to Haley’s house while Jack and Jessica were there? It was unnervingly specific. It meant that our Unsub was keeping tabs on the Hotchner family. And it almost felt like a threat that meant to say: “Remember, if you don’t follow the rules, I know where your family lives.”

He gauged her panic almost as quickly as he recognized mine back at the crime scene. He was pretty good with that kind of stuff. So he offered to talk to her in the break room where she could sit down and have a cup of hot chocolate to warm her nerves. She accepted the idea, but he asked for the folder first. Jessida handed it over, and Hotch handed it to me to give to the team. I carried Jack up the ramp and into the boardroom. JJ turned off the TV as quickly as she could to prevent Jack from seeing the crime scene photos.

“Haley’s sister just dropped this off. The Unsub sent it.” I handed it off to Morgan.

He inspected the cover, “This is addressed to Jack.”

I looked at Jack who was rolling the Hot Wheels Car over my shoulder in circles. I nodded to them, however, and said, “I know.” I carried Jack back out of the boardroom and we went to meet Hotch and Jessica in the break room.

As I walked in Hotch looked up to see that it was me and mouthed, “Thank you.” And I smiled. I set Jack down in one of the chairs next to Jessica and put the red triceratops on the table for him to play with. Hotch continued questioning Jessica to see if he could find out more about the delivery man. He asked at one point if the man looked injured, and when Jessica asked why, I realized that was one of the things the team had profiled while I was out of it a few minutes prior.

“No, he wasn’t injured,” she admitted. “He was just a normal guy who said that he was giving me that folder and that it was important for you to have it because a girl’s life depended one it.”

“That’s unusual,” I commented, sitting down next to Jack when he kept pulling on my sleeve for my attention. He handed me the dinosaur again and started butting heads with it and the Hot Wheels car. “Normally deliveries don’t just come with messages like that. What did he deliver?”

“A piece of paper with a bunch of random numbers on it.”

I played along with Jack, picking up the dinosaur and tilting it to the point that it looked like it was trying to eat the car. Jack tried to roll the car back and jam it into the side of the dinosaur this time. I made a quiet roaring sound as the dinosaur bucked up onto its hind legs before falling over, defeated. Jack did a victory lap with the car around the table, claiming glory for all to see. I smiled and looked up at Hotch again, who was trying to focus on the case, but I was being more than distracting. Honestly, I was just happy that Jack was alright. He had stolen my heart, I swear to god. I’d die if anything were to happen to that kid.

“We’re going to put you, Jack, and Haley in a hotel with a security detail. We’ll send you guys home as soon as we catch this guy. Do you mind staying here with Jack while you wait for an agent to collect you?” he asked Jessica. She shook her head. “Thanks.” He looked to me and gestured for the door.

I gave an acknowledging look before turning back to Jack. “Alright, little man, it’s time for me to go.”

“You can’t stay?”

“No… Your dad and I have to go work.”

“You’re a superhero like my dad?”

That took me by surprise. I didn’t see us as superheroes… And Jack’s comment suddenly showed me how much he loved and respected his dad, even though he hardly got to see him. Jack had no clue why his parents separated— or at least he knew, but he didn’t quite get it. All he knew was that his dad was this awesome super secret agent who was off all the time, busy saving the world; just like Superman or Batman would. He didn’t see a man who was so consumed by his work that he didn’t know how to make time for his family outside of what little he was given. Jack looked at Hotch the same way people looked at Batman. The ultimate hero.

I didn’t know how to answer Jack’s question. I wanted to be nice and play along, say that I was a superhero like his dad, but it felt wrong. It felt undeserved considering how many people we let die or suffer every day before we could pick up the cases. In a way, we were just the clean up crew. Something bad would happen and we’d be called in to fix it. We dealt with the dead bodies and the rape victims. We didn’t beat criminals to the punch before they could do harm. We had to wait for something bad to happen in order to make a difference, and that didn’t feel like being a superhero.

There was a knock at the door that saved me from having to answer Jack. Gideon carefully entered and told us that they ID’d the girl and that the team told him what happened with the folder. He looked to Jessica and told her that he’d have a sketch artist come in to meet with her before she would leave. Hotch tried to tell him that they hadn’t discussed that because the Unsub didn’t want us to go to the press. All Gideon did was look at Hotch and say, “I don’t care,” before trading spots in the room with the sketch artist.

Hotch chased after Gideon, and I used that as my excuse to leave the room, too, but I knew that I couldn’t follow them. I went back into the boardroom to find that JJ had left to go organize the press conference that Gideon wanted, Elle was asleep on the couch, and Reid and Morgan were still trying to piece together something about the video. They were trying to figure out what book we needed in order to complete the mystery, but they were really struggling to find any clues. I sat down and offered to help.

Morgan looked up at me from the shadow box that JJ had received from the Unsub. A smile curled at the corners of his mouth. “So… you and Hotch, huh?”

“Not right now, Morgan,” I hissed quietly.

“Wait— What?” Reid questioned.

Morgan’s smile grew. “Greenaway and Hotch are sleeping together.”

“We’re not sleeping together,” I hissed again. I was really trying to hold myself back from talking about it, as it wasn’t the time nor the place, and we would talk to the team about it when we were ready. Not when Morgan suddenly got bored with the case.

“Oh, yeah? Then what are you two doing? _Cuddling the night away?_ ” He puckered and smacked his lips together to make kissy sounds in order to tease me.

I rolled my eyes and picked up the baseball card that Gideon received. “We’ve been dating for four months.”

“Woah—” Morgan and Reid gasped simultaneously.

“Wait. Really?” Reaid asked, totally confused like a lost puppy. “How did we not notice?”

I shrugged.

“Elle,” Hotch said, coming into the room. When she didn’t wake up, he approached her and gently rubbed her shoulder, “Elle.” She sat up straight suddenly and began denying ever having fallen asleep. Hotch wasn’t having it. “I’m sending you home.”

“No…” Elle quietly argued, her eyes still trying to open up and adjust to the light in the room.

“You need to get some rest. You, Morgan, and Y/N are all going home.”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I spun around in my chair, “I’m not going anywhere.”

He stared at me, a challenge that I wouldn’t back down from. I wasn’t going home— especially since the Unsub had taken something from my place. And I wasn’t about to go home with Elle or Morgan either. Elle needed to sleep and not worry about babying me, and Morgan would only pester me for more answers about Hotch. The only other option, realistically, was going back to Hotch’s place, but even then, the Unsub kept taunting the Hotchner family.

Hotch broke eye contact with me, giving up before I could. “Fine. But, Elle, you need to go sleep in your own bed so that you can be on top of your game in the morning.”

“It’s already morning,” she teased. It _was_ two in the morning, she had him there, but it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, so he started glaring at her this time. She gave in easier than me. “Fine,” she threw her hands up in surrender. “Fine.”

“Morgan,” Hotch urged, gesturing to the door.

“No, sir, you could not pay me enough money to leave right now.”

Hotch sighed, knowing that he couldn’t win. “If anyone else falls asleep, I’m taking them home, no questions asked. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Morgan saluted playfully.

Elle grabbed her bags from the floor and walked with Hotch out of the boardroom. I could hear Hotch outside asking Anderson to drive Elle home, and her arguing that she could drive herself home. She wasn’t very good at arguing with Hotch. She just wasn’t good at arguing in general. She always gave up too easily.

Hotch came back into the boardroom after seeing Elle and Andersoon off for the rest of the night. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to go home?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Alright. JJ’s almost done with her press conference. Jack and Jessica are at the hotel with Haley. My work is done for now. I’ll be in my office, if you guys find anything.”

We all silently waved him goodbye as he retreated into his office and we were left to review the evidence yet again. Morgan was looking through the video tape and again, I was trying to decode the paper Jessica brought in, and Reid was examining my jewelry box. He had tried earlier to find some prints on it, to no avail— just like all of the other pieces of evidence. This Unsub just hadn’t left anything for us.

All we knew as of five in the morning, when the sun was beginning to rise for a new day, was the name of the girl he had: Rebecca Bryant. She had been missing for two years and no one ended up looking for her, but even more concerning was the fact that the Unsub hadn’t killed her yet. Reid always liked to quote the statistics of kidnapping victims' odds of surviving, and living past a year was nearly impossible. Usually, if they were being kept for long periods of time like Rebecca Bryant was, it meant she was being kept as a wife of sorts. But why would the Unsub want us to find her if that were the case? What did he gain from giving her up? What did he want from us?

My head was spinning again, but I didn’t want to fall asleep and have Hotch order me to go home. So I chose the next best thing. “Who’s up for some breakfast?”

Morgan sighed with relief, “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Donuts?”

“You treat me just right, mama.”

I chuckled. “Reid, want anything?” He shook his head. I stood from my chair and grabbed my things. “Text me with what Hotch and Gideon want.”

“You got it.” He winked and snapped his fingers at me. I rolled my eyes at him and hurried to the door. “Thank you, Greenaway!” he called after me. That was Morgan for you. He could be deadly focused on a case one minute, then teasing you about who you’re dating the next, then begging for you to get him something to eat. He was just lucky I liked him.


	5. ELLE GETS SHOT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Mentions of getting shot. Mentions of blood. Explosions. Mentions of kidnapping. Mentions of stalking. Literally the whole shabang.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 01. Right after part four.

**HOTCH'S POV**

Morgan came into my office just as the sun was rising over Quantico. The rest of the BAU, and really all of the FBI, was just starting to pour into the building for a long day’s work. He told me that Y/N went to get donuts and coffee for everyone, and offered me the chance to order something if I wanted. I stared at him with a blank face for a moment. No one went with them? We had an Unsub stalking us, and no one left Quantico with them? What the hell were Reid and Morgan thinking? Gideon made JJ hold a press conference almost two hours prior— which was a bad idea on its own— and now Y/N left without anyone with them? I didn’t doubt that they could handle themselves. I knew that they could. But this guy knew _everything_ about us. We could afford to take such a risk.

“No. I don’t want anything,” I responded calmly. Morgan shrugged and nodded, patting the door frame before leaving. The second he was out of sight, I picked up my cell and started calling them. They picked up after the first ring.

“Morgan was supposed to call me with your order, Aaron.”

“I know, I know. Why did you leave without someone else?”

I could hear the annoyance and defiance in their voice, “It’s not that big of a deal, Hotch. I’m just going to Leonard’s for donuts and coffee, and then I’ll be right back. You won’t even miss me.”

I already missed them, though. And I was already worried about them. They should have just gone home or stayed at the office. They knew better. But they were also reckless, and they didn’t like to listen to me. It was fun for them to push my buttons, but this simply wasn’t the time.

“Leonard’s and right back. I’m serious.”

“You promised to not worry so much about me,” they sing-songed.

I couldn’t help it. They sprang the “I love you” on me just the other night, and it awoke something in me that I hadn’t felt since Haley. Actually… to tell the truth, it didn’t even feel this way with Haley. All my life, I thought I was going to spend it with Haley; but she got tired of waiting around for me, and I couldn’t blame her. Then Y/N came along, and something changed. I didn’t have to pretend or settle for them. This job was just as important to them as it was for me. Making it work rather than putting unfair pressures on each other made me feel comfortable and loved. And now they were telling me to not worry about them as if I hadn’t said “I love you” back to them the other night and in Jamaica yesterday. I loved them with every inch of me and I worried about them every second of every day. I earned that right when I saw them playing with Jack and getting along so well with him. I earned that right when we said “I love you” to each other. I earned that right when they became my partner. I knew our rules, I knew our dynamic… But none of my feelings just washed away whenever I would get to work, contrary to popular belief.

“I'm not worried,” I lied. “I love you.”

I could practically hear them smiling through the phone. “I love you, too.”

We hung up our call and I sighed. They would be fine. Leonard’s was just a few blocks away— not even a ten minute drive. They would be around people, in the public eye. No one would be able to take them if they were being careful. And then they would be back before I could even say their name.

I stood and exited my office to check on the rest of the unit who was just now appearing for work. They all seemed busy, yet entirely ignorant of what was really going on. They only knew what everyone else had seen on the news, and that was all they needed to know. Everything was going to be fine. Like Y/N said, I had nothing to worry about.

And then I spotted Anderson at the copy machine.

My brows furrowed as I hurried down the ramp outside of my office and called his name. He looked up from the machine and fixed his posture to stand at attention like a soldier would for his commanding officer. I asked him where Elle was, and he only responded with a confused look. I asked him why he was back already, and he still looked confused.

“You told me to take her home, sir.”

“I understand that, but taking her home is not the same thing dropping her off. We have an Unsub who’s stalking our unit. He knows all of our personal information, including our addresses. You can’t just leave her there. Get back there now.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but I glared and he silently retreated out of the building. I picked up the nearest phone, which happened to be on Y/N’s desk, and tried calling Elle’s cellphone. When she didn’t pick up, I figured that she must have let it die or left it in her purse when she fell asleep. So I tried calling her house number. Still, nothing. Shit. I kept trying to reach her. I wasn’t about to give up. Soon, she would finally get annoyed by the constant ringing and would get her ass out of bed long enough to pick up the phone and let me know that she was alright. Either that or Anderson would get there on time and he’d call to let me know that she was safe. But until then, I wasn’t going to stop calling.

“Agent Hotchner,” one of the secretaries approached me. I raised a brow at her while still dialing Elle’s number. “The delivery man from the news last night is on his way up. He just turned himself in.”

Shit. I put the phone down. “Thanks for letting me know. Do me a favor, keep calling Agent Greenaway for me until she picks up her phone.”

“Which Greenaway, sir?”

“Elle.”

“Right away.”

We separated in opposite directions. She returned to her desk, while I headed up to Gideon’s office to let him know about the delivery man. Reid was in his office with him, which saved me some time from running around to tell everyone on the team. Gideon was up on his feet the moment I mentioned a delivery man, he didn’t even need to hear the rest because he already knew. That was why he had JJ hold the press conference. It wasn’t to snuff out the Unsub, but our only living witness thus far.

I was the first one into the interrogation room where the witness was waiting. He matched the description that Jessica gave the sketch artist perfectly. As we entered the room, his terror filled eyes looked up at me. People only looked like that when they had something to hide, but I didn’t think that a guy like this could be our Unsub. He was too shaky and shy for that— Not to mention that our Unsub wouldn’t’ve turned himself in when we still had some kind of quest to complete.

I decided to be up front with him. No dancing around it. We needed answers and we needed them fast. “You delivered a packing to my ex-wife’s house yesterday, and it was addressed to my son—”

“Do I need a lawyer?” he questioned.

I continued, trying to move past the idea of calling a lawyer because that would only slow us down. “It was late in the day. You told the woman you gave the folder to that it was imperative that it get to me because a girl’s life depended on it. Ring any bells yet?”

“I— I guess I could check my logs, yeah,” he stuttered.

“No, you already know which one I’m talking about.”

“Listen, all I know is that a guy came up to me, asked me if I could drop off this package a mile down the road, and that a girl’s life depended on it. I was headed that way, anyhow, I figured what could be the harm?”

“And you didn’t find it at all suspicious that this guy mentioned that a girl’s life was at stake?”

The witness shifted in his seat uncomfortably, a telling sign that he was about to lie. “No, I didn’t think anything of it. I heard that a girl was in trouble, so I knew that I just had to help. Does that make me a bad guy?”

I chuckled, “So you’re a humanitarian, then?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“How much did he pay you?” Gideon asked.

The witness looked at him and shifted again. “I… I don’t know what you mean…” He looked back at me, but I didn’t budge for him. He swallowed hard. “A thousand dollars in cash. Gave it to me when he gave me the folder.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. He had a big coat on and a big hat covering his face. All that I could actually see was his neck and his hands, and they were all fucked up. It looked like he had been burned everywhere.”

I looked over at Gideon. That was everything we were going to get out of this guy, and it was really all we needed. We silently left the interrogation room, but we didn’t release the witness yet in case we decided that we would have more questions for him later.

“Burn scars would explain why he seemed uncomfortable in the video,” I told Gideon.

“It’s also how we’ll find him.”

* * *

Reid smiled ear to ear after I complimented his good work— rightfully so, too. Together, him and Garcia had cracked a huge problem in the case. While we had earlier hit a wall with the numbers on the letter Jessica gave us, they had figured it all out finally.

Garcia opened her mouth like she was about to say something, likely to apologize again for her mistake. She knew that she had fucked up, and she knew that Gideon was the most upset about all of it. But as she was about to begin, a secretary joined us in the hallway to deliver a message.

“Agent Gideon, there’s a call for you on line 2.”

Garcia closed her mouth and let her shoulders fall as she hugged her files over her chest in order to put her guard up again. What little bravery she had mustered only seconds ago immediately disappeared and she was back to being silent and self-loathing again. Gideon sighed at the interruption, however, and asked who was calling and if it was really all that important. When the secretary responded that it was urgent and that the man calling had named himself “The Fisher King”, we all knew that something was wrong.

We all rushed to the door that led to the BAU wing. Gideon and I were the first to the phone; Reid, Garcia, and the secretary chased after. Gideon unmuted the call, put it on speaker, and introduced himself.

“I didn’t have any other choice,” the Fisher King said. It was the same voice which called me the other night when I was with Y/N. This was our Unsub. “It was distasteful and barbaric. But it had to be done. You forced my hand, Agent Gideon. I told you that there were rules, and you blatantly ignored me. So I had to make sure that you would never break the rules again. Agent Greenaway didn’t have to die like that, Agent Gideon, just remember that. If you would have listened, I wouldn’t have done it. Not like that. Remember the rules or there will be more consequences.” And then the call ended.

I looked up at Jason, my heart racing in my chest. Both Elle and Y/N were out. Anderson had just gone back to Elle’s place, which meant… No. I immediately reached for my phone and took a step away from the group as I began to dial their number. Straight to voicemail. I cursed under my breath as I dialed again.

Behind me, Gideon was instructing Reid to reach out to every nearby hospital in search of a patient with the last name Greenaway. The whole office was set in motion as everyone went to do their assigned jobs for when an agent was to go missing. Garcia hurried to her office to check the computers and Gideon went to grab his things— including his car keys. By the time he returned, I had called Y/N three times, and every time it went directly to their inbox. Either they were being an asshole and not picking up, or something truly did happen to them. I prayed that they were just being an asshole again.

“Hotch!” Reid called from the balcony. I looked over. “It’s Elle! She’s at Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center!” He retreated back into the boardroom to sort things out while Gideon threw his keys at me as we both turned to the exit.

I immediately turned on the lights and the sirens after we pulled out of Quantico. I was speeding down the roads, trying to avoid all of the cars who weren’t moving to the side for us, while also trying to call Y/N to let them know what had happened. They still weren’t picking up, and I remembered that they told me not to worry, but I didn’t end up worrying about Elle, and look at what happened. So I just kept dialing while Jason watched me out of the corner of his eye.

Please just be an asshole and not dead. That was all I wanted from them. I wanted the excuses, I wanted the fighting back, I wanted the sass and bratiness that all came with dating them. I wanted to know that I would get to see them again, to just hold them in my arms and tell them that I love them again. If I could have, I would have never stopped saying it because I wasn’t about to let them get away like I had with Haley. They weren’t going to win that easily. But they just had to pick up the fucking phone first.

I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. “Fuck,” I cursed under my breath.

“I’m not going to say it…” Gideon said, looking out the window to avoid my glare.

“Good. Then don’t.”

I knew what he was going to say. He didn’t like the idea of me and Y/N dating. He didn’t like the idea of anyone dating on the team because he knew what potential distractions it could create. But I didn’t care what he thought. At least not then when I just needed to focus on literally anything positive. So I tried to focus on how happy it made me to see Y/N with Jack. They were so good with him, and he took to them immediately. I had never seen him connect with anyone like that before. It was such a relief to me that they liked each other.

And then my phone started ringing.

I briskly flipped it open and brought it to my ear.

* * *

**READER'S POV**

I was busy juggling a box of donuts and a cardboard cup holder carrying four coffees when my phone started ringing again. Morgan had called me just before I started ordering inside at Leonard’s to tell me that JJ wanted a cup of cold brew, and that Hotch and Gideon turned down coffee, but Gideon would love a donut. So I ordered a dozen donuts— just to make sure there were plenty extra— and four coffees. Yes, four. I heard Morgan tell me that Hotch didn’t want anything, but I knew him better than that, and I knew that he would want it later, so I got him one anyways. I figured that even if he didn’t end up drinking it, someone else would. Maybe Elle would take it when Anderson would bring her back to the office.

My phone rang again on the way to the car, but I still couldn’t reach it with both of my hands full, so I just tried to hurry up to the car. It rang a third time and I groaned. It was probably just Aaron again, all worried that I wasn’t back yet. It wasn’t my fault that I got caught in the morning traffic outside of Quantico, and I didn’t realize that Leonard’s had some kind of deal on Sunday mornings which always drew in a huge ass crowd. It wasn’t like I made my trips to Leonard’s a common occurrence. I hardly ever went there, so I sure as hell didn’t know about any discount deal that somehow brought in half of Virginia.

The damn phone rang again and I cursed Hotch for making me practically run to the car. He was too worried about me since the other night. Granted, I basically had a breakdown yesterday when I saw my jewelry box, but we had our rules for a reason. I just needed him to calm down and wait until I could call him back. He had already called me three times while I was ordering, which I couldn’t answer any of those calls since I was already busy. Now he had called me at least four times on the way to the car, which meant that he wasn’t even waiting for it to go to voicemail every time.

I put the cupholder on the roof of the car so that I could have a free hand to open the car door. I reached into the car and set the box of donuts on the passenger’s seat, then went back to grab the coffees. They wobbled in my hands as one of the cups managed to slide out of the grip a little too far. I managed to catch it on time, thankfully, before it could spill all over me, and let out a sigh of relief before making sure the cup was put back all the way.

I slid into the car, closed the door, and put the coffees next to the donuts on the seat. When that was settled and I was fairly sure that nothing was going to fall over or spill everywhere, I reached for my phone to see what the hell was going on. Aaron had called me seven times. Seven. Either he was dying or they caught the guy and I could go home. Either way, I was going to kill him.

I dialed his number and called him back. It rang twice before he picked up. “I’m on my way, Hotch. Did you guys find something?”

“Why the fuck weren’t you answering your phone?”

“My hands were full. I couldn’t reach my phone. What’s going on?”

“The Unsub shot Elle.”

I stopped worrying about turning the car on and getting out of the parking lot in a rush but also satefly as he said it. I froze for a moment, just staring at the building in front of me. I tried to wrap my brain around what he said, and almost went to deny it, but I knew that he wouldn’t lie to me like that. So why had he said it? Maybe this was Gideon’s next ploy to try to weed out the Unsub, but they had to make it real, so they had to make me believe it. That had to be it. Elle was fine.

“Y/N?”

“Hmm?” I hummed into the phone.

“She’s alive,” he clarified. My gaze fell from the building and to the car’s emblem in the middle of the steering wheel. I was slowly starting to come back to reality. “She’s at Sentara North. Gideon and I are headed there now. I can have Reid pick you up.”

“No,” I insisted, my eyes falling shut. “I’ll… I’ll meet you there.”

“Y/N—”

“I’ll be fine.”

I hung up before he could say anything. He didn’t want me driving. I understood. But what else were we going to do? I put the car in reverse and started backing out of the parking spot I was in. I was just trying to come to terms with how the hell this could have happened. Aaron sent Elle home with Anderson. She should have just been resting in her bed while he kept watch. So how the fuck did the Unsub manage to break into my sister’s home and shoot her? Where was Anderson?

I thought about how Hotch wanted me to go home, even if it was with Elle or Morgan. He just wanted me to get some rest since I hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours. But I turned him down selfishly because I wanted to focus on the case. I knew that there was an Unsub out there who had it out for my sister, and I chose to stay at the office with Hotch. If I would’ve just listened, I could have been with Elle, and maybe I could have stopped the Unsub. Maybe she wouldn’t be in the hospital at all.

* * *

Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center was only a twelve minute drive from Leonard’s, I made it in nine. One of the Bureau’s vehicles was parked directly out front, and I knew that it had to be Hotch and Gideon, so I parked Hotch’s car next to it and hurried out the second I turned the ignition off. I left my purse, the donuts, and the coffees all in the car as I just hauled ass inside and ran up to the front desk.

The nurse at the front desk was taken aback by my panic and the way I was flashing my badge in her face, demanding for the floor number that Elle was on. After likely having just dealt with Hotch and Gideon perhaps a few minutes prior, the nurse already knew the floor to give me, and I was running again to the elevators where I kept pressing the up button like it would somehow make it arrive faster.

My foot tapped against the bottom of the elevator anxiously as I counted the floors I passed and the seconds it was taking to get there. For all I knew, Elle could have already been dead. Every second spent trapped in that elevator was one less second that I would get to be by my sister’s side when she needed me most. And I absolutely hated it. I hated not being able to make the elevator go faster. I hated that I didn’t pick up Hotch’s calls sooner. I hated that I didn’t just go home with Elle, instead I chose to get coffee and donuts like an idiot. Gosh, I was so fucking stupid.

The elevator dinged before the doors began to slowly slide open. The second the gap was wide enough, I squeezed past and ran into the bright white hallway. Ahead of me was a glass wall that divided the waiting room from the hallway I was standing in. Behind the glass, I could see Hotch sitting across from Gideon, who was working on a crossword puzzle in today’s newspaper. Hotch looked up from his hands like he could sense that I had just arrived. When our eyes met, he pushed himself to his feet and hurried to meet me halfway. I ran up to him and jumped into his open arms. My arms wrapped themselves around his neck and I cried in his shoulder. He tried to soothe me by rubbing small circles on my back with one hand, and whispering that it would be okay in my ear.

“She’s alright,” he told me. “She’s in surgery still, but she’s going to be alright.”

“I should’ve gone with her.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should’ve been there. It should’ve been me.”

“No,” he shook his head. “No.”

“How did this happen, Aaron?”

I felt like I was going to be sick again. The whole car ride over, I was convinced that it was some kind of sick joke. I didn’t want it to be real, so I tried to pretend that it wasn’t. But standing in that hallway, wrapped in Hotch’s arms as I sobbed and he tried to calm me down, I knew that it was real. I could feel it. My sister had been shot. The Unsub promised that the other one was being taken care of, and we thought that it was over when we got Elle out of jail in Jamaica. But the Unsub was only just getting started. He saved his big moment for when we least expected it. When we were all exhausted, hungry, separated, and our anxieties had actually calmed down. It was the calm before the storm, and none of us saw it coming.

Hotch was trying to find the best way to explain without hurting me. He was treating me like a victim of a case rather than his partner, because that was all he knew how to do. With Haley, he thought that he knew what he was doing, but she shattered his idea of love, comfort, and romance when she left him suddenly. Now, he didn’t know anything about how to comfort me in the way I needed most. And it made me sad. I was trying so hard to help him. We had gotten so far together since he first asked me out, but this was the one thing that we hadn’t prepared for. This was the one thing we never wanted to be ready for because we didn’t want to imagine that it could happen. So now he wasn’t prepared and it broke my heart.

He did what he understood, though, and that was explaining it to me like a stranger in a case who just lost a loved one. “He went in through the back door, caught her by surprise, and shot her.”

“Where?” I begged him for more details. As both an agent and her sister, I needed to know more than just that.

“The living room. He went through the kitchen and into the living room, and shot her point blank in the shoulder.”

I squeezed his neck tighter and he pulled me closer. “Why didn’t we know sooner?”

“The Unsub took her badge and gun.”

I pulled from Hotch and he let me, but his touch didn’t leave me. His left hand trailed up my side and up my neck before he cupped my cheek. He wiped away one of my tears with his thumb.

“The crime scene— I’ve got to go look at it,” I said desperately, trying to make a move for the elevator.

Hotch made sure to hold me still as gently but as assertive as he could. “No,” he insisted. “You don’t need to see it. Trust me. Anderson’s there and he’s sending me photos. You don’t want to know, Y/N.”

“I can find this asshole. I can do it if you just let me.”

“You need to be here for when Elle gets out of surgery and wakes up. She’s going to need you.”

I wiped another tear that was falling down my cheek. “That’ll be hours from now. I have to go—”

“I’m not letting you go anywhere,” he whispered with more harshness to his tone. “He called us after he did it…” Hotch pressed his forehead to mine. “He said that ‘Agent Greenaway didn’t have to die like that’ and I thought that he meant you.” His eyes fell shut as he tried to stop himself from crying. “I thought it was you and I nearly died.” He kissed me tenderly yet eagerly, just wanting to know that I was still there with him and that he could still kiss me. He didn’t want to think about losing me and the opportunity to love me. “So you’re not going anywhere until we find this guy.”

My fingers found the back of his neck and slid under the ends of his short hair. I grabbed slightly, not enough to hurt, but just to be affectionate. “Okay,” I gave in. He didn’t want me to leave, and I wasn’t going to fight him on this one thing. It made sense and I didn’t need to get under his skin when there was already so much happening. “I’ll stay.”

He let out a sigh of relief, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

It felt good to say it again to his face. It was the first time since the other night at his house. Just the difference between saying it against his lips compared to saying it into a phone made my heart flutter in my chest. Every time he said it, every time his face was so close to mine that I could feel his breath, and every time he looked at me like he loved me more than anything in the world, my day brightened just a little more.

Hotch escorted me to the waiting room where Gideon was pretending to still be focused on his newspaper, when, in reality, he had likely been watching Hotch and I in the hallway to get a feel for how serious our relationship was. I wondered what he thought about us. Gideon was always a softie deep down, and he was just another hopeless romantic like the rest of us; but he also held his own bias against coworkers dating, which made him view us differently. But I wondered that if after seeing us in the hallway and how we needed each other, he decided that maybe it was alright after all. Maybe he wouldn’t try to convince Hotch that it was a bad idea.

I sat down in one of the seats across from Gideon and Hotch let go of my hand. He wiped his face with both of his palms as he tried to recollect himself before turning back to Gideon. “Any luck reaching Morgan and JJ?”

Gideon shook his head, writing in another word on the crossword table. “They’re still out of cell range.”

“Keep trying.” He turned back to me, “Did you leave the drinks and food in the car?” I nodded. “Okay, I’ll go get them. You need something to eat.”

I whispered a thank you and slumped against the seat I was in. I watched him leave and step into the elevator. As the elevator doors began to close, he sent me a short, small smile. My head fell back gently against the back support of the seat I was in and I let out a heavy sigh. All I wanted was to be with Elle at her house, her asleep with me watching over her to make sure that she was alright. Maybe I just needed food and sleep like Aaron kept telling me. This whole time, while I had been fighting against him to make sure that I was constantly keeping up to date with the case, I had forgotten that I needed to take care of my body in order to keep pushing. And without having eaten anything in hours and I hadn’t slept in almost forty hours, I felt so weak. Even if Elle woke up or they found the Unsub, I felt like I would be of no use in the state I was in. It made me feel utterly powerless.

Gideon was still paying no attention to me— or at least pretending as such. He was purposefully doing it. No one could actually focus on a crossword puzzle like he was when one of the teammates was up in surgery and it was his fault. Yeah, I said it. This was all his fault. The Unsub gave specific instructions that we weren’t allowed to go to the media or any outside resources. He knew that there were rules, and he broke them, and I was sure that it had to do with Elle getting shot. Not only did the Unsub want Elle out of the way for some fucked up reason, but he wanted to make sure that we understood that there were consequences to breaking his rules. So he won by getting rid of Elle and proving a point to us. Two birds, one stone.

Gideon should have been more careful. He should have listened to Hotch about not holding the press conference. And that was likely why he wasn’t looking at me. He knew that I would be upset with him for letting this happen to my sister. He also knew that I wasn’t going to blame Hotch, even though he was the one who sent Elle home. He knew that I couldn’t do that, but I’d be looking to point fingers, and it all pointed to him. He was ashamed, and as much as I hated to think it, I was glad that he felt that way. I wanted him to regret his decisions. Because if he had just stopped to consider instead of going on a personal witch hunt, then Elle wouldn’t have been lying on a surgical table with doctors trying to pull a bullet out of her chest.

When Hotch came back with the donuts and coffee, I pushed myself to sit back up again. He took the seat next to me and handed me one of the coffees, another to Gideon, and one for himself. I knew that he would want it. I tried not to smile behind my cup. It didn’t feel like the time to smile about such a silly thing, but I couldn’t believe that I had him pegged like that. It felt good knowing him that well.

“I called JJ and Morgan, told them about Elle, but they're still heading out there,” Hotch explained to Gideon as he handed him a donut.

I raised a brow after accepting my own donut from Hotch. “Where are they?”

“They’re checking up on a lead about the victim and her family. They’re going North to talk to her family.” He relaxed in his seat beside me, “Anderson called as I was about to get in the elevator. He told me that they found a partial print at the crime scene.”

That was the best news we had all day. While we had been falling short of any real leads since finding the jewelry box yesterday, the Unsub leaving a partial print in Elle’s house meant that we were one step closer to catching him. One step closer to me looking at my sister’s attacker in the eyes as I got to read him his Miranda Rights and put him away for a very long time. That was a reason to smile.

“How did they get the partial?” I asked.

Hotch looked at me with soft eyes that spoke volumes. I didn’t want to know, according to him. But him not telling me only confirmed any suspicions I might have had about the crime scene. I saw what happened in Jamaica, I saw what happened with Frank Giles. Our Unsub liked to write messages in blood. “SAVE HER”, “IT’S BEEN HANDLED”, and “HERE THY QUEST DOTH TRULY BEGIN” were all apart of his M.O. He wouldn't have left Elle without completing his ritual.

So I wanted to know the truth. “What did it say?”

Hotch scratched his stubble and shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He knew that I wouldn’t stop pressing for answers, especially when it came to Elle. His choices were to either tell me or find a way to travel back in time and stop himself from ever saying anything else about the crime seeing. Seeing as the second option was neither logical nor possible, he had to give me something. He knew that I had seen all of the other crime scenes first hand, and if he reused to tell me, I would just walk right out of the hospital and drive over there to see it for myself. It didn’t matter what promises I made to him. If I didn’t get answers, I wasn’t going to stick around long enough for him to start an argument about it.

“It said ‘RULES’... In Elle’s blood.”

“I’m going to kill him, Hotch. I swear, I’m going to kill him, even if it kills me.”

I was right about the Unsub and his reason for attacking Elle. Gideon broke the rules and the team had to pay.

“We still don’t have enough for a profile yet, though,” Gideon said quietly. “At least not a good one.”

Hotch picked up my free hand with his and held it tight. Even with Gideon in the room, Hotch was going out of his way to make sure that he was with me, that I understood that he wasn’t going anywhere. We had our rules. We knew that we weren’t supposed to touch at work— especially not like this. But something had happened to Hotch while I was at Leonard’s. He said that the Unsub called them to tell them that he had killed Elle, but he used our last name, and Hotch’s first worry was me. The fact that he called me on my way out of the parking lot to give me crap about leaving on my own, then all of the calls at Leonard’s, and his persistent need for touch all told me that the Unsub had really gotten under his skin by using me. The call when we were together the other night was the first step, and it kept escalating from there. The Unsub wanted us to be together at all times, for some reason, and he found a way to ensure that it would happen. All it took was stalking us, sending something to Jack, and scaring the crap out of Hotch about losing me on a thousand separate occasions.

Hotch’s hand squeezed mine. “Once JJ and Morgan finish up with Rebecca’s family, we’ll hopefully have another lead. Until then, there’s not much we can do. I think we should all get some rest.”

Gideon shook his head and flipped the newspaper pages to a sudoku puzzle now. He was really trying not to face me, and I didn’t blame him. I was sending him the worst death glare I could throw at him for what he did. But Hotch was at least right about the sleep idea. I was done with my donut, and the warm coffee was starting to lull me to sleep, even though the caffeine should have knocked me back on my feet. I guessed that I just was so tired that even caffeine couldn’t save me. And there wasn’t anything to do with the case or about Elle in surgery. Hotch had the right idea, and sleep was the one thing I couldn’t argue with at that point.

I peeled my hand from Hotch’s so that I could push myself to lean forward and put the cup of coffee on the table in front of us. When I reclined back in my seat, I shifted to the side so that I could rest my head against his shoulder. My eyelids were already heavy to the point that they fell shut without any effort. Sleep felt so natural, I didn’t have to fight to keep my eyes shut or quiet my thoughts.

Everything was oddly peaceful in that hospital waiting room. The lights were gold and dim in order to comfort those who would be waiting around, just like we were. All of the newspapers and magazines that Gideon had collected in front of him just reminded me home and how my dad would lay them out the same way. The air conditioning was right above my head, blowing cool air that helped my heart rate slow down and find peace. It was just so quiet as though the room itself were inviting me to sleep for once. I didn’t mind the feeling at all.

“The press conference was the right thing to do,” Gideon said quietly, assuming that I was already asleep and didn’t want to wake me up. Hotch’s hand fell to my knee and his thumb started to draw slow circles over the fabric of my pants. “I mean, it forced the Unsub to come out, forced him to make a mistake like leaving a partial print. If I hadn’t done what I did, who knows if we would have that information. I did the right thing. I know I did. I was just doing my job. Elle will understand that and Y/N will forgive me.”

“Jason…” Hotch whispered, trying not to move the shoulder I was resting on. “It’s no one’s fault but the Unsub.”

“I know.” He sounded so unsure about himself as he stood to leave. “I know.” He carefully put the newspaper back down on the table. “Let them sleep. I’ll be outside if you find anything out from Morgan or JJ.” He patted Hotch’s other shoulder gently on his way out.

When Gideon was gone, Hotch kissed the top of my head clemently, “I love you.”

I nuzzled against his shoulder and picked his hand up to intertwine our fingers again. “I love you, too,” I whispered. He kissed my head again and I let out one last breath of relief and tranquility before I managed to fall asleep.

* * *

Hotch gently shook me awake about an hour later. I woke up carefully, rubbing the side of my neck where it was sore from being crooked against his shoulder for so long. He massaged my shoulder in an attempt to help with my tight muscles, but also to help me wake up from my nap. I didn’t think that I would be out of it for so long, but if I were just being woken up by Hotch, it meant that something had only just happened. Whether it was about the case or Elle, I didn’t know until Hotch was sure that I was entirely awake again.

I reached out for my coffee on the table, which was now cold, but it was better than nothing. I chugged the rest of it before setting it back down. Hotch threw his arm over my shoulders as I leaned back.

“The team identified the Unsub,” he finally said.

“How?”

“I don’t know. Gideon’s sending me to oversee the arrest.”

I jumped out of my seat. “I’ll go with you.” I was already fixing my hair back out of my face and making sure that my gun was prepped in its holster on my hip. I knew what Hotch was going to say before he even said it, and I already knew what my response was going to be.

“No. Stay here and wait for Elle.” Like I said, he was being predictable.

With my response already prepared, I grabbed my purse from the floor. “I’m coming with you, Hotch. I want to be there when we get this guy. I want to see his face when he realizes that he lost.”

Hotch stared at me for a moment before nodding, “Okay.”

He wasn’t going to win this one. I had gotten some food, coffee, and sleep. I was now at the top of my game, perfect for arguing with him. And while he usually enjoyed playing along, we were on a time crunch. So he gave in and we headed for the elevator. As we waited, I asked what we knew since I fell asleep.

Hotch told me everything the team had told him. Our Unsub’s name was Randall Garner. We stepped into the elevator. He was Rebecca Bryant’s biological father who had been severely burned in the fire that burned their family home down and killed everyone but Rebecca and Randall. When she was sixteen, Rebecca had been kidnapped by her father after he was released from a mental institution. He had been keeping her for two years before finally contacting us. Hotch wasn’t sure why yet, but he was sure that Spencer would have answers for when we would get to the office.

And answers he did have. From the moment we stepped into the office, everyone started bombarding me with questions about Elle, while Reid was trying to catch Hotch up with everything he had learned about the Unsub and the profile he had created single handedly while everyone was gone. Morgan and JJ were following me around with endless questions, even though I really didn’t know much more than them about Elle’s condition or the crime scene since Hotch refused to take me or tell me much of anything about it. I apologized for not having answers, and they seemed upset that they were just as helpless as I was. 

“He thinks that we’re modern-day Knights of the Round Table,” Reid explained to us as the group of us walked into the boardroom. There was a woman sitting in the corner, biting her nails, but I was the only one who seemed to take notice. “He thinks that he’s in a fantasy world where Rebecca is a grail that we need to rescue in order to save the day.”

“Do we know where he is?” Hotch asked, refusing to take a seat at the table.

Reid, Morgan, and JJ all looked through the files they had pulled and the notes they had taken, but there was nothing. His last known address was his home before it burned down in the fire— then, technically, the mental hospital. That was it, though. When he was released, he went off the grid. No one had any clue as to where he was.

“I have something,” the woman in the corner spoke up.

Reid leapt from his chair and hurried over to her, “No, mom, it’s okay—”

He came to a sudden halt when his mom pulled a photo from her purse and handed it to him. Spencer examined both sides before turning to all of us with wide eyes that told us that he suddenly understood so clearly. He handed it off to me and I took a look at it myself. One side was an address and the other was a picture of a large house in the middle of the woods.

Reid’s mom had this the entire time and she never said anything. The Unsub gave her another clue— the last clue— because he knew that Reid would send for her. To make sure that she was safe. He knew Spencer and the rest of us like he _was_ us and could guess what we would do before we could even think of it for ourselves. He was ten steps ahead of at all times when he never should have even been a single step ahead of us in the first place.

I handed the photo over to Morgan. “Shiloh, Virginia?” he read the address. “That’s only ten miles from here.”

“Gear up quickly,” Hotch ordered, already heading for his office.

We all jumped to our feet and headed for our desks. Hotch was up in his office, calling the SWAT team for back up and giving them the address of where to meet us. Morgan tossed me another flashlight after I tested mine to find that it had died after Reid used it yesterday to find the jewelry box clue.

The five of us— me, Hotch. Morgan, JJ, Reid— all hurried to one of the FBI company black SUV vehicles and stuffed ourselves inside. Hotch turned on the lights and sirens before we even made it out of the parking lot and started hauling ass down the streets towards Shiloh. None of us said anything. We were all just focused on getting there and finally taking this guy down. We wanted answers and we wanted him to pay for all of the suffering he caused. It was high time he met his modern-day Knights of the Round table, just like he wanted.

The SWAT team Hotch had called in was already parked in front of the house when we arrived. They were all huddled around the trunks of their cars as they put on their gear and loaded their weapons. While we drove up the path with all of the lights off, they looked over to make sure that we were a friendly vehicle and not the suspect or otherwise.

Gravel crunched under my shoes as I jumped out of the car and walked around to the back where Hotch had popped the trunk for us to grab our bullet proof vests. I threw mine over my head and worked in silence as I connected all of the straps. Everyone was silent. The only sounds that echoed were from everyone’s boots compressing the gravel under us. If the Unsub were near a window or door, he likely would have heard us, even though we were all trying to be quiet.

When everyone was ready, Hotch traveled to the front of the group to lead us in. He gave a silent signal, and the SWAT team split into three small groups. One headed to the left, another to the right, and the one Hotch and I went with went straight for the front door. Our team split up, too. JJ and Morgan went to the left, Hotch and I down the middle, and Reid to the right.

We were still quiet as we ran up to the door and Hotch messed with the doorknob to see if it was unlocked. When the door opened easily, he gave us a silent signal to be careful because the Unsub was likely expecting us. This was his game, afterall. He had to know where the players were at all times.

Hotch and I went together towards the dining room while the SWAT members of our group branched off to check the kitchen. With our guns raised, Hotch and I ran into the room. We checked every corner, hiding spaces behind doors, cabinets, etc. but there was nothing. Rebecca had to be somewhere in the house, we were sure of that much, the only question was where?

I dragged a finger over the dining room table before bringing it up to my eyes. The table was caked in dust, just like everything else in the dining room. Around the table were six chairs, each covered by white sheets. From the other end of the table, Hotch whistled quietly to catch my attention. He was holding Elle’s badge and gun. So we _did_ have the right guy’s house. That was some consolation.

“It’s Morgan. We’re clear on this side,” he said over the comms.

“Kitchen’s clear.”

“Living room clear.”

“Nothing in the parlor.”

“Dining room’s empty,” I said.

“I’ve got movement upstairs,” Reid said.

Hotch and I gave each other a nod before traveling together towards the staircase. Reid was halfway up, his gun and flashlight pointing at the hallway that diverted to the right of the stairs. He gestured with his flashlight that he saw someone heading that direction, and we followed him up.

The SWAT team ran past us, taking the lead in order to clear the upstairs rooms while we followed Spencer’s hunch. Reid, Morgan, and Hotch were in front of me, JJ behind me. She tapped my shoulder when we reached the top floor and she pointed towards the left, letting me know that she was going to look for Rebecca on the left side of the house with the SWAT team. I nodded an acknowledgement and continued to the right.

Reid jumped across the entrance to another hallway that turned to the left. He hid on the wall opposite Morgan, Hotch, and I. Morgan took point on that wall closest to the new hallway, meanwhile Hotch and I backed up for support. Down the new hallway that we had discovered, there was a room all the way at the end. The door was half open, and I saw a man pass by it. My blood ran cold as I gestured to Hotch that I saw Randall Garner.

“Cover me,” Morgan whispered to us.

“No, no, no,” Spencer insisted. Morgan stepped back from the corner. “Give me a second.” He raised his voice, “Mr. Garner? My name is Dr. Spencer Reid. I’m with the FBI. You were in the hospital with my mother. I think she may have confused you about who we are and what we do. All we want to do is help Rebecca— which is what you want to do, too, right? That’s why you sent us the puzzles and the clues. That’s why you wanted to see us.”

“Did you bring her?” Garner asked from his room down the hall. The sound of leather creaking echoed in the hallway just after I saw him taking a seat at a desk inside.

“Bring who? Rebecca? We don’t have her. You do.”

“No. No. The one Arthur loves. Guinevere.”

Hotch, Morgan, and I all exchanged confused glances. Arthur and Guinevere? We knew that he saw us as the Knights of the Round Table, but we didn’t know that he had assigned us to the specific character.

“We didn’t bring any Guinevere,” Reid played along.

Randall Garner huffed angrily from his office. “I was very specific that Agent Hotchner and Agent Greenaway were to be together the entire time. Did you not learn your lesson about obeying the rules?”

I suddenly realized that Aaron was Arthur and I was Guinevere. That was why he wanted us together. He saw our relationship and wanted us to recreate how he imagined the characters behaving in his delusion. We were only confused at first because he said “she” and that wasn’t what any of us were used to. The only “she” we brought with us was JJ, and she was off searching the other side of the house. 

“We brought Agent Hotchner and Agent Greenaway, yes.”

“Ask the question, dear Guinevere.”

I looked across to Reid for an answer because I didn’t know of any question. Was it in one of the clues that Spencer solved? It had to be. “He believes that if you ask the right question, then it will magically heal his wounds. That’s why he wanted us. He thinks that we have magic.”

“Do you know the question?” Hotch whispered.

Reid shook his head, “But I know what he wants. Fall back.” He held his gun out to me, which I reluctantly took. “It’ll be fine…” he told us before walking into the hallway with his hands raised. “Stay calm, Mr. Garner.”

“Ask the question, Ser Percival, if Guinevere is incapacitated.”

“I told you, I’m not Percival and Y/N isn’t Guinevere. My name’s Spencer and we work for the FBI. You know my mother, Diana, from the hospital. Do you remember?” He kept walking down the hallway, closer and closer to the room Randall was in. “I think she might have made you think that your daughter is a grail and that we’re knights sent to rescue her.”

“ _No_. Your mother was very specific—”

“My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic who would forget to eat if she wasn’t reminded. She doesn’t know real from fiction, just like you, Mr. Garner. We’re not characters in a story. We’re real people who have come to help you and your daughter.” Reid finally reached the door and carefully pushed it open. I tried to crouch down low to get an angle on Garner, but Reid was entirely in the way. I couldn’t see anything. “Don’t you want to help your daughter?”

“My daughter doesn’t really exist. She never did.” Leather creaked again and I could tell that Randall had spun around in his chair, but I still couldn’t see him. “Ask the question!” he demanded with more force.

“Hey, guys…” Spencer called back to us calmly. “Maybe you guys should go wait downstairs.”

“ _What?_ ” I hissed.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Morgan responded to Spencer.

“Ask the question! Heal me!” Mr. Garner shouted.

I couldn’t hear anything else that was being said. They were too far into the room and their voices had lowered so that their conversation was just theirs. I didn’t know if Reid was getting anywhere with Randall, and I didn’t know if we were going to get the location of Rebecca. Now that we had the bastard, all we needed now was to find his daughter.

Reid started running back down the hall, headed straight for us, yelling, “Run!”

Next thing we knew, the office Mr. Garner was in exploded, shaking the entire house. Reid dove to get further from the blast, and Hotch turned and covered my head with his arm. After the explosion, Hotch and I stood up straight again and made sure that the other was alright before looking over to Morgan and Reid. Morgan was putting out a fire that caught on Spencer’s legs while also helping him up to his feet.

The fire from the explosion started to spread along the hallway, making its way straight for us. We didn’t have much time before the whole house would burn down. I made a dash for the side of the house, calling for the SWAT team and JJ to hurry back downstairs, warning them of the fire that was spreading. Hotch and Morgan were pulling Reid along with them towards the stairs.

“What the hell was that?” Hotch asked.

“He had a bomb,” Reid responded, coughing the smoke out of his lungs. I went in front of them and started racing down the steps. “Wait— Stop, stop, stop, stop… Rebecca—”

“Reid, there’s no time for a search.”

Spencer shushed Hotch and pushed his hair out of his face so that he could think more clearly. “Randall was the fisher king, and this is his castle… Rebecca has to be here…” He snapped his fingers when a lightbulb went off in his mind. “The basement! She’s in the basement!”

Everyone started running downstairs, chasing after Spencer who decided to take the lead again. The boys ran into the basement while JJ and I made sure all of the SWAT team got out safely. We weren’t about to leave a man behind after all of this. Once they were all out, JJ and I stood on the grass in front of the house to watch as it burned. I was staring at the front door intently, praying that they would het Rebecca and come out soon, because if they were going to waste another minute inside, I was going to go back in to find them.

Just as I thought it, though, Reid and Morgan came stumbling out, but not Hotch. I ran back up to the front of the house and caught Morgan. “Where’s Hotch?” I questioned. He was coughing too hard to answer. All he could do was point into the house. “Hotch!” I called, continuing up to the door. “Hotch!”

When I was about to take a brave step into the house, Hotch came stumbling out with Rebecca in his arms. I moved out of the way and followed him back into the grass where he gently put her down. I grabbed his shoulders and turned him to face me.

“You okay?” I asked worriedly.

He nodded. “You?”

I nodded with a sigh of relief.

“Hey, lovebirds!” Morgan called. “Fire department's on their way! We should get Rebecca to the hospital!”

He was right. Randall was gone and Rebecca needed to get treatment. She had been trapped in that basement for two years— who knew what he did to her, even if she was just his daughter. The fact that his delusion was so strong that he couldn’t even recognize that they were family meant that he could have done horrible things to her. Things that I didn’t want to consider. So the best thing to do was make sure that some doctors could check on her.

JJ, Morgan, and Reid took Rebecca in the car we arrived in. Hotch decided that he was going to stay to make sure the fire would be contained and that the SWAT team would clear the area safely. In the car, however, there was no room for me when they had laid Rebecca down next to JJ in the backseat to make sure that she was comfortable. My only option was to stay with Hotch and wait to get a ride back into town.

When the fire department showed up, they drove onto the grass and tried to maintain the fire spread, attempting to keep it away from the woods surrounding us. As Hotch and I watched, my phone started ringing. I turned around, took a few steps out of the way, and answered the call.

“Y/N?” It was Gideon’s number, but it was Elle’s voice. She had woken up after surgery. She was okay. “Are you there?”

I didn’t realize how silent I had been while just thinking about the weight that lifted off of my chest when I finally got to hear her voice again. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here, Elle.”

“Did you catch the son of a bitch who did this to me?”

I glanced over my shoulder to look at the burning house. “He’s gone.” I bit at my nails and kicked the gravel under my feet nervously. “Are you okay?”

“Never felt better,” she laughed shortly before wincing in pain. “When can you come visit me?”

“I’m on my way right now. I promise.” I snapped in Hotch’s direction to catch his attention before pointing to my phone and mouthing Elle’s name to him. He nodded, said goodbye to the chief of the fire department, and came over to me. “Hotch and I will be there in a few minutes, okay?” Elle hummed an agreement on the other end. “I love you, Elle.”

“Whatever you say, loser. Just get here as soon as you can,” and she hung up.

I rolled my eyes and bit back a smile. The SWAT team had room for us in one of their trucks and offered to drop us off at the hospital. It was a kind gesture, one they really didn’t have to give us, but they said that they didn’t mind since it was on the way back to their office. In the truck, everyone was just as silent as when we first arrived at the house. Even when they dropped us off at the hospital, they only wished us goodnight in quiet murmurs before we closed the back of the vehicle and they were off again. Hotch and I didn’t watch them drive off. We immediately hurried into the hospital and headed for the room that Elle had been assigned to.

When we got to Elle’s room, I saw Gideon sitting beside her, reading something about the case, and she was staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. As Hotch and I entered, however, Gideon stopped reading and Elle broke her trance to look over at us standing in the doorway. She smiled at me as best she could considering the facts. She had only just gotten out of surgery and she was in a lot of pain, and she would be for a long time. The physical and mental wounds of being shot at point blank range wasn’t anything that usually disappeared overnight, no matter how hard Elle would try to convince herself and us otherwise.

Gideon squeezed Elle’s hand gently before standing from his seat and taking his leave from the room, still refusing to look up at me. Once he was gone, I stepped further into the room and took a seat next to Elle’s hospital bed.

“He’s dead,” I told her. My vest was still on and my hair was still pulled back out of my face, which was a tell tale sign that we had just gotten back from a scene, but the fact that Hotch was covered in soot was another sign that something had happened. “We found the girl. She’s going to be okay.”

“That’s good,” Elle smiled.

Hotch was still standing in the doorway, watching Elle from a distance as she slightly struggled to breathe with the oxygen they were pumping into her nose. He gulped and looked at the floor. “I’m going to head out and make sure that the rest of the team is alright.” He glanced at Elle shortly, like he had only mustered enough courage to do so for a few seconds, “I’m glad that you’re here. I’m sorry for sending you home like that.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Hotch,” she insisted, shaking her head to encourage her point. 

Hotch nodded like he was trying to convince himself that she was telling the truth, but it wasn’t quite sticking with him yet. He switched his glance to me, “Are you going to stay here tonight?” I nodded. “Do you want me to bring you a change of clothes?”

“If you don’t mind.”

The left side of his mouth curled into a small, shy smile. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” He waited for Elle to look away for a brief moment so that he could steal a second to whisper that he loves me. I whispered it back to him and his smile brightened before he left.

Elle looked at me with a grin, “So… Hotch, huh?” I glared playfully at her, daring her to be careful. “I can’t believe I owe Morgan $20. Is it too late to break up with him?”

I smiled but scrunched my brows in curiosity. “$20?”

“I thought that you would end up going out with him. He didn’t think it was possible. Maybe he knew about you and Hotch this whole time and just wanted my $20.” I hit her good arm gently. “Ow!” she laughed.

“It’s a good thing we’re in a hospital, otherwise I would have killed you.” The joke didn’t quite land the way I thought it would. “Sorry,” I doublebacked.

Elle squeezed my hand. “I’m just glad that you’re here and that you’re happy. That’s all a sister could ask for.”

“I love you.”

She smiled behind the oxygen and the pain coursing through her veins. “I love you, too.”


	6. WE'RE BOTH TRYING TO PROTECT THEM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Talk of shooting, murder, etc. Allusion to rape, child pornography. -- everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 06. Two months after part five.

**HOTCH’S POV**

I heard a hum in my ear to coax me out of my dream and into the morning. They were nuzzled right up against my back, holding me tight. Their breath was hot against my cheek, but that didn’t matter. It was relaxing the way they continued to hum, even though they were probably aware that I was awake already. I kept my eyes closed, hoping that we could stay like that forever, that I could trick them into staying in bed with me for the rest of our lives. This was everything I wanted. It had only been two weeks since they moved in, and yet it felt like a lifetime. I loved it. I loved them. It felt crazy to keep saying it. I loved Y/N Greenaway. It was crazy, but it made all the sense in the world.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” they finally whispered in my ear.

I smirked and rolled over so that I could hold them in my arms. “Morning.”

“You snore, you know.”

I kissed their cheek. “And you talk in your sleep.”

“No, I don’t,” they laughed, poking my side.

“Yes, you do. I’m going to record it one of these days just to prove it.”

“I’ll move out, Aaron Hotchner, I swear to—”

I shut them up by pressing a kiss against their lips. They sighed through their nose as they gave up everything for me so that I could kiss them harder and dominate our kiss with my tongue. When they moaned in my mouth, I knew exactly where this was headed, but I also saw the time on the wall and knew that we couldn’t “sleep in”. So I pushed myself away from them and rolled away to make sure things wouldn’t progress. They whined.

“You do that in your sleep, too,” I teased. They scoffed and hit my shoulder. “I’m just saying.”

“Remind me why I moved in with you.” They squinted at me.

“Because you love me.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I caressed their cheek with my thumb. “I love you, Y/N.” They looked at me with a sparkle in their eye that made my heart skip a beat. “I love you,” I repeated before kissing them again. Screw the time. But then they pushed me off. This time,  _ I _ whined. “Come on.”

Y/N smirked at me. “We have to go to work.”

“We can spare a few minutes.”

“It’s never just a few minutes,” they told me as they escaped my arms and rolled out of bed. I bit my lip when I saw them hurry around the bed to grab their robe from the closet. “Stop staring,” they begged me as they walked.

“Never…” I mumbled.

They were perfect. Every inch of them. They thought that they had flaws, and they told me that there were parts of themself that they hated, but I didn’t see a single thing wrong with them. Ever. There were bits and pieces of them that weren’t normal by society’s standards, but who the hell cared? They were absolutely gorgeous to me. If I could have, I would have stared at them all day, every day while telling them how much I loved them over and over again. I fucking loved them. So much. I wasn’t usually the sappy kind, but… there was something about them that made my heart swell.

“Hey, so, I have to tell you something,” I said as I got out of bed, too. I joined them in the closet to grab my clothes for the day while I continued, “The Bureau concluded its internal investigation into the Lee case yesterday.”

They turned to me, eyes bright, a smile on their face, a black tee in hand to put on. “Really? What’d they say? Can Elle come back to work now?”

I nodded slightly while pulling a grey suit jacket off a hanger. “Yeah.”

“That’s such a relief,” they sighed, grabbing a pair of grey bell bottomed dress pants for themself.

I didn’t say anything as they left the closet to go to the dresser in the bedroom to grab a bra, pair of panties, and socks. They were going to kill me with all that lingerie in their drawers. It was nearly impossible to unpack it in the first place before I made them try all of them on. Even then, we only got through about three sets before I pinned them to the bed. I forgot what it was like to have someone else in the house with me, especially someone who liked to walk around naked just to tease me. Brat. They were so distracting. This was what Gideon had been trying to warn me about, but I just couldn’t help myself. They were so intoxicating.

“About that,” I resumed with my original intent, “I’ve actually requested that she undergo a psychological status report.”

I heard them drop their clothes on the bed. “You  _ what _ ?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds, baby,” I insisted, bringing my clothes with me out of the closet. “It won’t take more than a day. I just want to make sure that she’s alright.”

“’Alright’, Aaron? Why? If the Bureau cleared her, what’s to know?”

“She’s been through a lot since Randall Garner shot her, Y/N. She hasn’t been the same since, and we both know it. I just want to make sure that whatever happened with Lee won’t happen again.”

“She did it in self-defense.”

I sighed to myself. We both silently started getting dressed. “I don’t want to fight with you when we’re having a good morning.”

“We’re not fighting.”

“Aren’t we?”

They stared at me once they clasped their bra on. “I’m sorry,” they apologized quietly. “I just… She’s my sister.”

“I know,” I nodded, buttoning my shirt up. “That’s why I’m doing this. I want to make sure that she’s okay. She means a lot to me, too.”

They took in a deep, calming breath while throwing their shirt on over their head. I grabbed my boxers and pulled them up. Silence still hung in the air for a little longer as we finished getting dressed. When I walked over to the dresser to get a tie, Y/N stopped me. We both avoided eye contact for a little longer, but I knew what was coming. We were sorry. I was lying to their face about what was really going on with Elle, and they didn’t know it… That made me feel like shit. But they couldn’t know the truth, either. At least not until I was sure. Something happened with Lee, more than what Elle was letting on, and sooner or later the truth was going to come out. That was why I ordered the psych eval. Y/N couldn’t know that, though.

“I trust you, Aaron,” they finally said to me, making me look at them. “If you think that Elle needs this, then I won’t argue with that. But… at some point, you’re going to have to stop chasing ghosts.”

I tucked a strand of their hair behind their ear. “I just want to make sure that she’s okay.” That and to find out what really happened, but they didn’t need to know that yet. They were really worried about Elle, too. We all were. It was part of the reason I was doing this. I couldn’t rest easy without knowing the truth, but it was even worse to know that Y/N was suffering without answers. “She  _ will _ be okay, Y/N.”

Y/N nodded before escaping my touch to go finish getting dressed. I silently did so as well.

* * *

It was getting harder and harder to focus at work. Between thinking about what to do with Elle and the images of Y/N running through my head  _ constantly _ , I could barely make it through every page of the report I was reviewing. Moving in with Y/N was difficult, but for all the right reasons. I loved them, and having them around was the greatest gift I could ask for—hell, I knew what I was signing up for when I initially asked them to stay for the two weeks we were supposed to have off before the Fisher King interrupted. They looked at me, said “I love you”, and I knew then and there that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with them. Having them move in was a big step, but it was one that we were clearly ready for. That being said, however, what I wasn’t prepared for was how tired I was at work because they were keeping me up every night, and every time I looked over at them in the bullpen, I could practically hear them moaning my name, and I could feel them shaking in my hands as they came. It felt like I couldn’t breathe because every glance in their direction made me want to drag them into my office, bend them over my desk, and fuck them as hard as I could. That was what moving in with them was like.

But then there was the issue of Elle. I knew that something happened with Lee. I had zero doubts. I trusted myself and my profiling abilities, and I knew what I felt. She did something… and it was probably illegal. I loved Elle. She was a great coworker and a great friend. Even more concerning was the fact that she was Y/N’s sister. Whatever I found out or decided with Elle was going to impact Y/N more than with anyone else on the team. I had to do my job. Y/N and I made a promise that our jobs would come first, and we set rules to make sure we’d obey that promise. Yet… how was I supposed to do my job when this was going to blow up in my face and effect Y/N? I could see the outcome of all of this, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be good. My job. Y/N. Elle. It was all… too much. Hence, why I couldn’t focus.

There was a sudden knock at my door. I looked up from my paperwork to see Elle standing there. She smiled at me, but I didn’t return the favor. All I did was tell her to come in and close the door behind her while I finished up what I was working on. Her smile quickly faded as she did what she was told. Despite focusing on my paperwork in front of me, I could sense Elle’s movements about the room. She quietly approached my desk and carefully sat down in one of the chairs across from me. When I didn’t immediately look up at her, she patiently waited for me to finish up. She was so different from Y/N. Though they were both wild and hated following orders, Y/N would’ve completely ignored that I was trying to work for the sake of teasing me and making me uneasy at work. Elle, on the other hand, had recently grown obedient. Probably because she knew that she was in trouble. But still. Sometimes it was hard to believe that they were sisters.

I closed the file in front of me and threw it in the completed pile. “This is the Lee case file,” I told her while grabbing another file on my desk. I handed it to her. “The Bureau has concluded its internal investigation, and they’ve cleared you to work in the field again.” Elle’s face brightened. There was the similarity between her and her sister. “They accept your claim that you had to kill Lee in self-defense.”

“’ _ They _ accept’?” she inquired carefully.

“Yes.” I understood the true meaning of her question, but I dodged for the time being. I needed to tread lightly. Not only was keeping the peace between me and Elle important for the sake of our job, but for the sake of Y/N, too. “As your supervisor, I’ve ordered a psychological status report.”

“After the Bureau’s cleared me?” She sounded a little more on edge now. I nodded. “I don’t need a shrink. Hotch.”

“No, you don’t. That’s why I’ll be leading it and assessing you.”

Elle scoffed. “You think I’m lying.”

I wanted to tell her, “Yes, I  _ know _ that you’re lying. I can’t prove it yet, but I will eventually.” But I couldn’t say that. Not only did I not want to stir up any drama, but I was also aware of how my interest in the Lee incident didn’t make total sense. I kept asking myself why I cared so much. Elle was part of this team, and like everyone else, I trusted her. If she said it was self-defense, I should have trusted that, just like the rest of the team had. But I couldn’t. It didn’t sit right with me. Something happened out there in Dayton, Ohio, and I needed to know the truth. Like I said, I wasn’t sure  _ why _ , but I just had to.

Because I couldn’t say that to her, I had to dodge again with, “You’re the only one who really knows what happened that night, Elle. You won’t even talk to Y/N about it. Actually, you won’t talk to them about anything that has happened since the Fisher King. Since you won’t talk to anyone, I’ve ordered it because I think that you need to be honest with yourself. If not for your sake, then for Y/N’s.”

“What does this have to do with them?” she asked bitterly.

Elle had understandably been a bit upset since finding out about me and Y/N. She didn’t appreciate that her own sister was keeping secrets from her, especially one like dating their boss. But… Y/N was originally very clear about not wanting to tell anyone at the office about us because they didn’t want to make things awkward for the team— which I agreed with— and because they weren’t sure how serious we were going to be. Truth was, however, that from the moment I asked them out, I had this weird feeling that they were the one. I had a similar feeling back in high school with Haley, but this was different. With Y/N, I felt that tug towards them ten times harder than I ever did with Haley. I  _ thought _ as a young, naïve high schooler that Haley was the one. And for a while, she was. But I wasn’t the one for her, and that was alright. But when I met Y/N, I finally realized what the real “one and only” feeling actually was. So while I knew that I was serious about being in a relationship with Y/N, I understood their hesitancy towards telling our friends and family. Elle, on the other hand, didn’t seem to get it. She was rightfully offended that she had to find out through an Unsub’s taunts… the very same Unsub who later shot her.

“We’re all worried about you, Elle,” I continued dodging her questions, “which is why I just want to do my due diligence with this.”

“I appreciate your concern, Hotch, but I’m  _ fine _ .”

“Are you?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, scoffing again.

“You’re anxious and you’re on edge. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Y/N’s worried sick. They’re not sleeping.”

“Then they should come talk to  _ me _ , their  _ sister _ , about it.”

I squinted. “I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize hypervigilance, Elle. Your answers are all defensive and deflective—”

“So are yours. You haven’t answered any of my questions.”

I hesitated to not say anything. She was right, of course. I hadn’t answered any of her questions on purpose, mostly to see what reaction I could get from her. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn much. That was the downside of trying to profile a profiler. They always knew how to get away with it. “Your first evaluation’s in an hour. Don’t be late.”

Elle rolled her eyes slightly, just like Y/N would. They were  _ eerily _ similar when they were annoyed or uneasy about something. Y/N did it to get under my skin. whereas Elle had done it to show that she was thoroughly irritated with how I was still prying into something she clearly didn’t want me digging around in. That only made me more interested, though. Even as she left, and I could see her anger in her posture, my mind raced with everything I had just learned. Obviously, I knew that she had been hiding something. But what I learned in that meeting was that she hadn’t anticipated that people would be digging around. I think she expected that I would drop it, just like everyone else. I think she expected that I loved her sister and trusted her enough to not realize that there was something more that happened with Lee that night. I wasn’t blind. I had been doing this much longer than Elle— far longer than the rest of the team, too (besides Gideon, of course). She couldn’t hide anything from me. She was trying, I’d give her that, but I saw through it all.

Honestly, Y/N was going to kill me. That was what I was terrified of. They were very protective of Elle, though they weren’t very close. When Y/N and I first started going out, they told me that they hadn’t talked to Elle for a while until she moved from Seattle to Virginia in order to join the BAU. Even then, Y/N tried to keep their distance from Elle because they were jealous of the promotion she got into the BAU first. But they also told me that they grinned and beared it because they liked seeing me whenever they could. That was the funny part about us. We had these high school type crushes on each other for years, yet we never said or did anything about it until they finally joined the team— which was probably the worst time to do it, professionally speaking. They wanted to see me whenever they could, so they would use Elle as an excuse to hang around the office. Other than that, however, they hadn’t talked to Elle much.

Since joining the team and getting the field experience, things had changed. Elle was always extremely protective of her sister. Always. Even when we first met in Seattle, she asked if I knew the name Y/N Greenaway, and she asked how they were doing. When she moved to the Quantico office, she attempted to mend whatever bridge had burned between them, even though Y/N was reluctant. Elle was trying. She got her sister back, and she didn’t want to lose them again. That being said, I think she was already losing them. She just couldn’t see it yet.

Because of the Fisher King incident a couple of months ago, Y/N was now the most protective over Elle I had ever seen them. Our argument that morning was Exhibit A. Not only were they keeping a closer eye on Elle in the field, but if someone tried mentioning Lee, the whole thing blew up. I hated that. And I knew that because of this newfound protective stance Y/N had, it would be impossible to explain all of this to them. So maybe I wouldn’t…

It wasn’t like us to argue— especially like that. I mean, to most people that wasn’t a huge fight, right? But Y/N understood my past with Haley and that small things like that… Well, they knew I needed to find answers and common ground rather than argue about the little things for no reason. They were good with those things. Dating them was a relief because they  _ understood _ that about me. But if I kept this from them… If I held a secret as huge as this just to avoid arguing with them, that made me the bad guy, right? I mean, I was doing it in order to protect them, so that didn’t make me that bad. Lying for the sake of protecting loved ones was alright sometimes. Right?

* * *

Y/N and I went out for lunch together after the first evaluation I had with Elle. We met in the interrogation room, just to ensure privacy, though she saw it as anything but that. After that, she was sent to meet with a psychologist friend of mine within the Bureau to discuss the mental aftermath effects of getting shot by Garner. After lunch, I was supposed to meet with Elle again to check in on how that meeting went, then continue what we were talking about in the morning. It was a simple plan, and I told Y/N about it to ease their nerves about the whole thing. They seemed to continue to trust my judgement on this. For that, I was grateful for them.

After seeing them to their next in the bullpen, I buried my hands in my pockets, then started making my way towards my office.

“Sir, we’ve got a problem,” Anderson said while chasing after me. I acknowledged him but kept walking. “Agent Greenaway never showed up for her evaluation this morning.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What?”

Anderson bumped into my shoulder by accident. “She left after you finished talking with her.”

“And you’re just now telling me?”

“No one knew.”

I sighed and turned to look at him. “Don’t tell Y/N.”

“Yes, sir.”

I nodded and continued walking up towards my office, but I took a sharp right to head down the balcony towards Gideon’s office. I knocked on his door and waited to be let in. When I heard something that sounded like a, “What?!”, I entered.

Gideon was sitting at his desk on the right side of his office, reclining in his chair, reading a report that he had been given from another unit within the Bureau that needed a consultation. He quickly glanced up at me as I approached, but seemed unbothered by my presence, so he looked back down. As I sat down, he asked me what I needed. I stayed silent for a moment while I thought. I rested my elbow on the arm of my seat and traced my thumb against my bottom lip. How was I supposed to go about this? Gideon was better than me, so he probably already knew what I was thinking because he had been pondering the same thing. We were in a tough spot. As unit chief and head profiler, we had all the pressure resting on my shoulders with this whole situation.

“I sighed. Elle left before her second evaluation,” I finally said quietly. “Strauss knows, I think.”

Gideon sighed and set his work down. “Lee?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“It doesn’t look good for her,” Gideon admitted.

I chuckled shortly to myself and shook my head. “No, let’s be honest, we know  _ exactly _ what it looks like.”

“Elle let emotion and personal feelings get in the way.”

“And it goes against everything we stand for.”

Gideon squinted at me lightly. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking to himself: “And you haven’t with Y/N?” I wanted to tell him that I had done everything in my power to keep my relationship with Y/N out of work. We were both professionals, and we took our jobs seriously. We knew that allowing our feelings to get in the way of our jobs would be detrimental to our careers. We loved each other, of course, but that was for home, not for work.

“So don’t you make the same mistake,” he warned. I knew what that meant, too. He dodged the implication, however, with adding, “She’s innocent until guilty,” as if to prove that he was really still referencing Elle and not the fact that I was slightly backing off from all of this because of Y/N.

“What happens if I prove it?” I asked hesitantly.

Gideon sighed. “Handle it quietly.”

“And Y/N?”

“I’ll go with the team to Texas… including Y/N. You handle Elle.”

Was he really insinuating what I thought? I mean, arresting Elle wouldn’t be a  _ quiet _ ordeal. Y/N would find out immediately and all hell would break loose. The only way to handle it quietly was to… But Gideon wouldn’t offer that option. Would he? He loved Elle like a daughter the same way he loved Reid like a son, so maybe he really did mean it. If I proved it, he didn’t want me to do anything about it.

“You’re sure about this?” I questioned.

“I’ll go with the team. You find Elle.” He wasn’t going to admit anything in the same way that Elle wasn’t going to admit anything. That was the downside of working with profilers. “It’ll be fine.”

I nodded before silently getting up from my seat. I returned to my office, waiting for the team to leave before I could go to look for Elle. If I left now, Y/N would notice, and it would raise questions. Besides, I had to call Garcia and ask her to track Elle’s phone first to make my search easier, and though Garcia was the best of the best, getting her to do it discreetly would take some time. So I waited. Gideon went to the bullpen to tell the team to grab their things and head to the jet. Y/N looked up at my office, catching me as I stared at them. They cocked a brow at me. I could tell that they didn’t understand why I wasn’t going, but I didn’t want them to worry, so I just smiled and shook my head as if to say: “It’s alright. It’s nothing. Go. Be safe. I love you.” They nodded, their eyes softening almost into a plea that said: “I trust you, but I’m worried. I’ll go. I’ll be safe. I love you.”

Then the bullpen was empty, and I immediately made my move for Garcia’s office. I explained to her that no one could know that I was looking for Elle, which only seemed to raise more questions, so I just insisted that it was an order to keep it to herself that I needed her to track Elle’s phone for me. Garcia fell silent. She croaked an agreement before turning to her computer and started working while I headed down to my car.

Garcia tracked Elle’s phone to her new apartment at The Langham building. When I arrived, I saw her BMW parked out front, the trunk open with bags and boxes sticking out. She was leaving. Well, technically, she was running. She probably figured that the evaluations I ordered wouldn’t turn out well for her, so rather than take that risk, she was dropping everything in order to get away. She was leaving behind her sister, her parents, her team, her friends. Everything. All because I wouldn’t let this go.

This was the outcome I had hoped for, though, wasn’t it? I wanted a way to handle this  _ quietly _ , as Gideon put it, and if Elle left, then there was nothing to handle in the first place. Even if I found proof that she had done something illegal that night at the Lee scene, she would be long gone, giving me no chance to arrest her and make things miserable for Y/N. So maybe it was a good thing that it was ending like this. Maybe I didn’t need to worry too much after all.

I still tried calling her phone, though, just to make sure something wasn’t wrong— or maybe to prove myself that she wasn’t really running from Y/N, she was just moving to a new apartment. She would pick up if I called. She would explain why she missed her evaluation, I would tell her that it was alright, and we would all move on like this didn’t happen… But then I saw her come out of her building with a duffle bag in hand as the phone rang. She looked at her phone to identify that I was calling, then she suddenly threw her phone away into the trash can on the curb. I sighed to myself.

Shit.

She closed the trunk of her car, threw the duffle bag in the passenger’s seat, then went around to sit in the driver’s seat. She kept her head low as she started the car. Following her lead, I turned on my car again. After a minute of watching her get settled, she started driving down the road, and I waited a few extra seconds before moving to follow her.

Elle knew that the best way to remain undetected in a city full of FBI agents, where one of them was looking for her, was to blend in. She obeyed every law. She went the speed limit exactly, slowed down at yellow lights, stopped at red lights, stopped at stop signs, yielded for pedestrians, the whole shebang. About five minutes into the drive, I realized that we weren’t heading towards the airport or the highway. About ten minutes into the drive was when I realized that she was driving to mine and Y/N’s house. She had no clue that Y/N was gone on a case. I knew this because she pulled up into the driveway while I stayed around the corner, and when she got out with something in hand, she rang the doorbell and waited. Y/N was supposed to pick up Jack early from school and be home already, which was probably why Elle expected that someone would open the door. Yet, when no one answered, she let her shoulders fall in defeat. My brows furrowed in curiosity as she left a package at the door. She turned from the door, took a step off the porch, then stopped to smell the flowers out front. They were still freshly planted, a weekend project I took up just after Y/N moved in because they mentioned their favorite type of flower, and I decided to surprise them by planting them out front.

When Elle drove off again, I sped up to the driveway, raced to the front door with the car still running, grabbed the package, got back in the car, and hurried to catch back up to Elle. As we drove through more of the city, I kept glancing over at the package in my passenger’s seat. The package itself was just a bland brown box, but there was an envelope taped to the top of it with Y/N’s name on it. I didn’t want to spy on Y/N, but I had to know what was in that letter and box. If it was something harmful to them, or if it was something that admitted the truth about Lee, or if it would in any way make Y/N an unwilling accessory to the crime, I had to keep it from them. They just couldn’t know the truth, and they couldn’t get dragged into all of this.

So as Elle turned into the parking lot of a cemetery and I parked a few rows behind her, I grabbed the envelope. I kept an eye on her still while she got out of her car and started wandering through the rows of graves. Glancing back and forth between her and opening the envelope, I managed to get the letter out.

“Dear Y/N,

I know you probably hate me right now, and I’m sorry. I promised that I would never leave you again, and, unfortunately, that’s a promise I can no longer afford to keep. I did something that some people can’t forgive. I did something that  _ you _ would never be able to forgive me for. For that reason, I have to leave.

Since I was shot, I haven’t been the same, we both know it. I need something new. I need to be someone new. Being in the FBI doesn’t make me happy anymore. Being around you and Hotch doesn’t make me happy anymore. That has to do with him, though. Never doubt that I love you with everything I am. No matter who I am or what I do, I will always love you. That’s what I told you when I gave you that old jewelry box on your eleventh birthday, and that’s why I’m telling you again. No matter how far apart we are, no matter what we’re doing with our lives, we are still sisters. Nothing will change that. Time, distance, or even death can’t change that, even if they try. We’re blood. But I just can’t stick around anymore. I’m sorry.

One day, this will all make sense. One day, you’ll forgive me for leaving. One day, we’ll see each other again and I’ll apologize a thousand times. For now, however, I have to leave, and I don’t want you to come looking for me. Please. I need to do this, and I need to do it alone. I’ll see you when I’m ready. I know that isn’t fair to you, but it’s what I need to do for myself. You can understand that, right?

Until then, here’s something to remind you of me. It’s to replace the old one. Garcia told me the truth about the pictures you hid in the last one; and I figured between that and what Garner put in there, you wouldn’t want the old one back. So, take this one, keep it as a reminder of me, use it to hold good memories this time. For my sake. Please.

I love you, Y/N. More than anything. I’m sorry.

Goodbye.

Elle.”

I sighed and folded the letter up before putting it back in the envelope. I didn’t have to open the package to know what was in it. Randall Garner, the Fisher King, stole the jewelry box Elle gave Y/N years ago in order to taunt us. He stole the photos that Y/N hid in there, and he replaced them with a disc and a lock of Rebecca Garner’s hair. I remember it like it was yesterday. Y/N saw that the photos were gone, and they collapsed on the ground as panic overtook them. They tried explaining that the photos were just stupid topless pictures of them in high school, but when I went to console them, they explained that it was worse than that, they just didn’t want the team to know. They never told me the entire truth about the pictures, however. That knowledge came to me through Garcia, which seemed to be the same way Elle found out, too.

Apparently, Morgan was telling Garcia what happened, and because she just  _ had _ to know who could possibly hurt our family, she started digging. I almost wish I didn’t know. Sometimes it would keep me up at night. I’d have nightmares that I was getting called to a crime scene, and I’d walk in to see Y/N lying there… the pictures around them… I hated it. I hated the man who did that to them. I wished I could find him and kill him. I mean, Garcia already did the first part, and I was itching to complete the second half of it… But then that would’ve made me as bad as Elle. I would’ve been in the wrong, the same way she was in the wrong.

When I looked up, I saw that Elle was standing in front of a grave in the distance. It felt like a bad idea to confront her there, but where else was I going to do it? Before, at her apartment and my house, I wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing; but with this letter she intended for Y/N, I knew what the endgame was. It was now or never.

I pulled on the door handle before pushing the door open far enough for me to get out. When I was standing on my feet, I adjusted my suit, then locked the car. Elle still hadn’t noticed me. Even as I made my way through the parking lot, onto the grass, and I carefully wove my way through the graves, she still didn’t notice. The closer I got, the more I began to realize where we were. I hadn’t realized that he was buried in Virginia… Though, in hindsight, I supposed that I should’ve assumed. Y/N’s family was in Virginia, so it was probably where he died, but I didn’t… I wasn’t sure what I was so taken aback.

Y/N and Elle didn’t share the same father, that much I knew. Elle’s father, Robert Turner, had been killed in the line of duty, and Celia Greenaway, their mom, remarried a few years later. Y/N’s father, Kenneth Bolton, worked at the Bureau’s Academy while simultaneously raising two daughters while Celia was always off in the field, traveling around the world for the CIA. A family filled with agents and cops… that must have been something while growing up. That was the extent of my knowledge about the Greenaway family. As I understood it, they took their mother’s name because their family was very forward thinking about it all, and Celia wanted to make sure that her children were connected as much as possible. Sharing a last name ensured that they wouldn’t be able to separate themselves. Though, in times like this, I almost wished that it would have been easier for Y/N to distance themself from Elle, but that was another can of worms.

Elle always seemed like she thought of Ken like her dad, and that was that. I mean, she obviously missed her dad, and he was a huge part of why she started off with local crime in Seattle, then moved to the federal level later in life. She wanted to be a cop like her birth dad. That was understandable. Y/N wanted to be apart of the Bureau, like their birth dad. That was understandable. But I hadn’t anticipated that Elle would come here while she was trying to run away. She had to know that I was going to catch up to her, and that it was risky to stop at his grave, yet she did it anyways. Whatever the reason was, it had to be important… like confessing sins that only the dead could know.

“You’ve been following me,” she said to me, though she didn’t turn around. “I saw you back at my apartment, then at your house. It’s a cute, homey place. Did Y/N put those flowers out front?”

I shook my head. “No. I planted the flowers there for them because I know it’s their favorite type. I wanted it to feel like their home, too.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“What’s going on, Elle? Why are you running?” I took a step forward when she didn’t respond. “Elle, I’m listening. Please. Let me help you.”

She turned to face me. “Okay,” she sighed. “I really wanted to be a part of this team.”

“You are—”

“But when I needed the team most, I was all alone. I was alone in the one place that I have a right to feel safe, my home. Just like those women who were attacked in Ohio.”

“So does that make it right to take the law into your own hands?”

Elle furrowed her brows. “What makes you say that I have?” She was still playing the game of innocent and naive, even though I had seen through it a thousand times.

“Because you’re here, confessing your sins to your father. You left a note on our doorstep for your sister, you even bought them one last gift to remember you by…” I hesitated as she looked at me with red eyes. “You know that I can never give Y/N that letter.”

She pouted at me. “You have to.”

“I can’t. It will tear them apart to know that you abandoned them.”

“I’m not abandoning them,” she cried, finally letting herself break down. “I’m trying to protect them.”

“And so am I. You know that I don’t have any proof of what happened that night, but you also know that as long as you’re here, I’m not going to let this go. We both know that as soon as I have the slightest bit of evidence, I’ll have to arrest you… and that… Y/N would never forgive me, and they would never forgive you, either. They don’t deserve that pain. You know that as well as I do.” I shifted on the balls of my feet and buried my hands in my pockets. “We both love them… and we don’t want to see them get hurt. Giving them that letter will only give them a reason to go looking for you and more answers. We don’t want them to know the truth, Elle. Right?”

Elle didn’t say anything. She sniffled shortly before wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“I know that you’re thinking about them right now. I know that you’re trying to find the easiest way to say goodbye without having them run after you. Let me handle that. But you need to leave. You need to go and never look back, because if you do, I’ll have no choice but to arrest you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” she mumbled under her breath. “I get it…”

* * *

Nose deep in work, I finally managed to get caught up on the reports I had to review. With Y/N gone and the Elle thing…  _ potentially _ handled, I was able to settle long enough to focus. I missed them. That part was hard to ignore. My heart wrenched in my chest while thinking about missing them, which was why I decided on trying to work rather than dwell on what happened with Elle. It was going to be challenging when Y/N got back, but it would be worth it because at least I would have them, and there were a thousand ways I was thinking of greeting them when they got home. It was just a matter of one. They had only been gone the one day so far, and the case could go for a week or so. I supposed that at some point, once I was sure that things with Elle were final, I could head down to Texas to join the team. Though, on the other hand, that would have seemed more suspicious than just waiting it out.

My train of thought was broken when the phone on my desk started ringing. Still looking at the paperwork in front of me, I answered it with, “Hotchner.”

“Hey,” I heard their voice. I melted slightly. “You’re still working?”

I smiled and leaned back in my seat so that they could have my full attention. “Yeah. You?”

“No. We’re about to head home, actually. JJ’s getting the jet sorted so that we can get home within the next four hours or so.”

I looked at my watch. It was already ten, which meant that they wouldn’t be landing until at least 3:30 in the morning, and by the time they got home it would be about 4AM. But if I stayed at the office, I’d see them around 3:45. I was willing to do that. If it meant seeing them as soon as possible, I was going to grin and bear it, and I was going to stay awake until I could hold them in my arms and refuse to let go.

“Wait—” I squinted. “You’re already done?” How did the team wrap the case up so fast? We were good, but we weren’t that good. Were we? Or, I guess, were  _ they _ all that good without me there to baby them? Interesting.

“Unsub was a kid. Caught him on his way out of school when he tried to attack another girl.”

I sighed disappointedly. We hardly ever got cases that weren’t dealing with adult white males, and yet the one time I wasn’t there, Y/N had to deal with arresting a kid without me. It wasn’t easy taking down kids like that. Usually there was the question of if arresting them really was the best thing for them, but then you were always reminded that they were just like any other Unsub. Deranged and psychotic. Still, every time we handled cases with kids— victims or Unsubs, it was hard to not think about Jack. My heart would break for those kids every time. Before meeting Y/N, all of my nightmares were about Jack, but now they were about Jack  _ and _ Y/N. I could imagine that Y/N was having similar nightmares, just about me and Jack. And I wasn’t there. I should’ve been there to comfort them, to tell them that Jack was alright, and that he was a good kid, and that nothing bad would ever happen to him. Y/N probably needed that… yet I wasn’t there. I was in my office because I had been following their sister around all day just to threaten her while she stood over her father’s grave. Jesus, I was an asshole…

“You still there?” Y/N asked.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” I gulped. “Fly safe and get back as soon as you can.”

“I will.”

“I love you.”

They didn’t respond, which was probably because the team was around. I understood. So when they hung up, I also understood that they didn’t want to say goodbye, and since they couldn’t end with telling me they loved me, they would tell me a thousand times when they would get back. I was fine with that. I was more than fine with that. I loved that. I loved them. Jesus, I was a little head over heels, wasn’t I? It felt like high school all over again when I didn’t understand myself and all the feelings swirling inside me. I thought I knew myself and I thought I knew my feelings, but then Y/N came along, and I was… swept off my feet.

“Was that Y/N?” Elle asked from the doorway. I looked over at her, staring for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Are they okay?” I nodded again. “Good.” She stepped into my office and approached my desk. I watched silently as she put her gun and badge down on my desk. “This is not an admission of guilt…” I nodded again. “But you’re right. We need to protect Y/N. That’s our job as the people who love them most. I’m not leaving for you or me, Hotch. I’m leaving for them. I’m leaving because I know that I don’t want you to spend every waking moment looking into something that isn’t going to bring you any levity. I’m leaving because I don’t want to ruin the best thing my sister has in their life, which is you.” The room fell silent. She stepped away from my desk. “What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing. If they ask, I’ll tell them I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, because I don’t want to know. It’s better if I don’t know.”

“Do you think that I’ll ever be able to see them again?”

“I don’t want you to.”

Her gaze fell to the floor. I could tell that my words stung her, probably because she felt like I had no right to tell her to stay away from her sister, but… protecting Y/N was the most important thing to me. If I ever saw Elle again, I’d have to arrest her. I just knew it. No matter what would be going on, no matter who was around, no matter how far into the future, I would have to do it. This wasn’t a bridge that could be mended anymore. I knew that convincing Y/N to not go looking for their sister was going to be a challenging task, and if Elle kept coming back to see them, it would only make my job that much harder. Therefore, Elle needed to stay away. Not just because I didn’t want to be the one to arrest her, but because I had my family to think about. If I was right, if she really killed Lee in cold blood, then she was a monster, just like the Unsubs we hunted every day. I couldn’t let her around my son or Haley. It would be better if she just stayed away forever.

“You know,” she croaked, “when I first started this job, I couldn’t understand for the life of me why you refused to smile.” She started walking towards my door. “But, then Y/N would walk into the room, and your whole demeanor would change. You’d perk up and smile at them. Then, when they’d leave, you’d go back to being a stone-cold bastard,” she laughed to herself. “And then they joined the team, and you started smiling every time they were around but weren’t looking at you. I remember they were so worried that you hated them because you treated them like shit at first, but I always saw the way you looked at them, and I knew that there was no way in hell you hated them. And, yet, for some reason, I was shocked to find out that the two of you were dating. I was shocked and angry, but the two of you couldn’t stop smiling while around each other. That was when I realized something, Hotch. I realized that you never smiled before because you were lonely and broken…” She opened the door all the way and took a single step out before looking back at me. “I’m glad that Y/N has you. I wouldn’t be leaving if I weren’t absolutely sure that Y/N has someone looking out for them.” She took another step out. “Will you do me a favor, Hotch?” I didn’t respond. “You don’t have to tell them anything about me leaving… I know you don’t want to… but… when they get sad, or when they miss me, or when they get worried about me… tell them I love them, and I miss them. Every day.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Thank you, Aaron.”

We both stared at each other for the longest moment. She never called me Aaron. No one did but Y/N. I mean, yeah, there were times when Gideon or other close friends would slip up on it, but no one ever looked me in the eye and said it with purpose. It caught me off guard entirely. It was hard enough as it was to say goodbye to Elle, but hearing that broke my heart. I was going to miss her. Despite how cold I had been to her since Lee, Elle was still my friend. It was going to be hard not seeing her every day. It was going to be even worse knowing that I couldn’t tell Y/N the truth. The good news was that all of this would be a distant memory eventually. At some point Y/N would stop asking about Elle, and it would get easier to lie to them.

“Goodbye, Elle…”

She smiled shortly at me before closing the door behind her. I watched through the windows as she grabbed only her purse from her desk in the bullpen, then left the office like it was any other night. No one around her seemed to notice, and none of them will until Morgan or Reid would inevitably clear out her desk once they realized that she was never coming back for them. This was going to tear them apart. I knew Y/N. They were never going to let this go. Even if they forgot about it, they were always going to hold onto hope that Elle was going to come back for them. But Morgan and Reid were realists who knew when they were being left behind. This was going to hit them like a train, and I was going to be left to pick up the pieces.


	7. ON THE PLANE TO ST. LOUIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SMUT!! Cursing. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Name calling. Brat taming. Teasing/edging. Oral (male receiving).  
> The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying "good girl".
> 
> Timeline: Season 2 Episode 09. A few days after part six.
> 
> A/N: Real quick, because this is based off of my shifted reality, I do mention that the reader has dark hair. This is because, one: that's how I scripted my shift; two: it's actually relevant to catching the Unsub towards the end. So I apologize if you don't have dark hair (tbh I don't even have dark hair irl lol) because I know that this is supposed to be an x Reader story. I just had to put the hair color in there. Hopefully ya'll can forgive me! :)

Hotch had the radio running on his favorite channel on our way to work. One hand was on the steering wheel, tapping along to the beat of Bohemian Rhapsody, while the other hand was intertwined with mine on the armrest console. The traffic wasn’t that bad for a Monday morning. In fact, it was just a relief that we hadn’t been woken up before seven or called in on the weekend. The days when we didn’t have to race around were the best, and the mornings were always the most peaceful and memorable. Hotch was always in a good mood on these kinds of days.

As BoRhap slowed to its end, I untangled my hand from Hotch’s so that I could channel surf until we would find another song of interest. Hotch caught my hand before I could reach the radio buttons, though. He laughed and insisted that my hand stay with him the whole time. I rolled my eyes and called him clingy as I reached over to the radio with my other hand.

I figured that he was likely holding onto my hand for dear life because if he wasn’t, he would have found his fingers roaming somewhere that deserved a little more than half the attention he’d be able to give while driving. It wasn’t his fault, though, to be fair. I was in a mood and had decided to wear the one dress he could never get over. It wasn’t any kind of special black dress other than the fact that it was shorter than anything else I had. One wrong move of my legs or a single gust of wind, and my panties would be on display for everyone. Hotch knew this as well as I, and he knew that I put it on that morning for that reason alone. He also knew that if he dared to venture beneath my dress with his hand, it wouldn’t end there. He would have to have me before work, but doing so meant likely being late— which was something he wasn’t willing to do when he was the leader of the unit. So his hand stayed connected to mine.

As we turned into the parking lot at Quantico, we saw Morgan and Garcia walking in together. It looked like he had come out to help her carry some things inside telling by how he wasn’t carrying anything that didn’t belong to Garcia. I smiled. Morgan was good like that. That was why people loved him— especially Garcia. Their connection and friendship was perhaps the strongest in the unit, if I were being honest. Even my sister and Morgan weren’t that close, despite how hard they tried. It wasn’t like she told him that she was leaving the BAU. Hell, she didn’t even tell me. All I knew was that when I returned from an assignment with Gideon, Elle was gone and Hotch wouldn’t tell me what happened.

I tried not to think about it when Hotch put the car in park. I didn’t like to think about why my sister decided to leave, and I didn’t like to speculate about why she would have done so without telling me or Morgan. It was just something I had to live with and hope that sometime soon she would reach out when she could.

Hotch grabbed his coffee travel mug from the cupholder, opened his car door, and stepped out. Meanwhile, I was struggling to juggle my purse, the files I took home for the weekend, my coffee, and coping with the fact that I would have no hands to pull my dress down the few extra inches it could go. Hotch didn’t know that the dress stretched like that. He always thought that it was impossibly short, but he had to know that just wearing tights was not enough of an excuse for me to actually wear this to work. I knew that I would have to pull it down before going in, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that with my hands full.

“Babe,” I said to him before he could close his door. Hotch poked his head back in. “Could you take the files for me?” He nodded and took the stack of files from me before standing up straight and closing his door. With one less thing to carry, I slid my purse up my arm and grabbed my coffee. As I slid out of my seat and stepped onto the concrete, I pulled down the hem of my dress to reveal the few inches I always had tucked under the waistband.

Hotch was watching me from the sidewalk. “You mean to tell me that you always did that to that dress?”

I smirked, “I gotta keep you on your toes, don’t I?”

He wasn’t laughing. His face was stone cold and he was staring at me with the look that said: “If we weren’t at work right now, I’d fuck you up against that wall right there.” But the best part was that he couldn’t do that. Like I said, we were at work, and we both took it deadly serious… except for this one time… This one time when I really wanted to fuck with him after the weekend we had. So I returned his glare with a bright grin that said: “Too bad you can’t do anything about it.”

He took in a deep breath through his nose as I walked past. He was holding himself back, I knew it. Every step I took in front of him was just daring him to do something about it, but I ultimately knew that this behavior would later be my downfall. Well, maybe.

In the elevator, Hotch kept his back pressed to the corner while I stood up front towards the doors. He was still watching me carefully, and I let him. Maybe he was also trying to figure out how and why I always rolled up my dress— as if it weren’t obvious. Or maybe he was just admiring what he desired but couldn’t take in that moment. I wouldn’t be able to tell without turning around to get a good look at his face.

“I love you,” he finally said as we approached our floor.

I smiled at my blurred reflection in the elevator doors. “I love you, too.”

When the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, Hotch hurried past me and went straight to his office with his head hanging down low. Everyone in the unit watched him pass by then turned to look at me as I walked in.

Morgan whistled, “Someone’s trying to impress the boss.”

I rolled my eyes and made my way to my cubicle. “Fuck you, Morgan.”

“Ooh. You kiss your boss with that mouth?”

“I do, in fact.” I put my coffee down on my desk and threw my purse under before I sat down.

“You hurt me, Greenaway. I can’t get to you like I can with Reid. What am I supposed to do?”

Reid looked up from his desk at the mention of his name and began to defend himself, which only gave Derek another chance to give him a hard time. While JJ sat back and laughed at the two of them butting heads again, I glanced up at Hotch’s office real quick. There was a woman standing in there with him, talking about something that made both of them smile.

I turned back to the team, “Who’s that in Hotch’s office?”

Derek stopped laughing and reclined in his chair while he tried to figure out who the woman was. When he couldn’t come to a conclusion, he shrugged. I looked at both JJ and Spencer and neither of them seemed to know either. But it was 9:58 and it was time to head into the boardroom to review this week’s assignments and decide where to start. As JJ started to corral us in that direction, Hotch was also trying to excuse himself from his office.

While we waited in the boardroom, Gideon went to grab Hotch since he hadn’t managed to get out of that meeting yet. JJ began to hang up crime scene photos and maps on the walls with Morgan’s help just as Garcia came in, followed by Gideon and Hotch.

“We’ve only got one case,” JJ said, tossing the stack of identical case files on the table for us to distribute evenly. “Well. Technically _two_. St. Louis has two serial killers on the loose right now. The local PD reached out to us a few months ago to consult on one of the cases, but, at the time, there were only three murders, and it seemed like they had it under control, so we didn’t step in.”

“What changed?” Morgan asked.

“There’s at least six women dead now.”

“How do they know it’s a serial killer?” Hotch questioned.

“The Unsub takes all of his victims in broad daylight in populated areas then murders them in the woods. It’s the same MO for all six murders. They reached out again last night after Ellen Carroll was reported missing yesterday by her husband. The first two victims were found near Mill Creek, which is how the Unsub got the nickname that we’ve been seeing in the newspaper.”

Spencer scoffed after looking over the map of Mark Twain National Forest, where Mill Creek was located. “The forest is 1.5 millions acres. It’s no wonder as to why they didn’t find the bodies sooner. It would take forever to comb the entire forest.”

“JJ,” I said, “what about the other case?”

“Eight prostitutes have been killed by a serial killer who has been contacting a journalist down there named Jim Meyers about his work. He brags about the murders and has even nicknamed himself the Hollow Man.”

“So he isn’t getting the attention he thinks he deserves,” Gideon pointed out. “He’s reaching out to the media to make himself known because no one’s reporting it of their own volition.”

“Why not? Eight women shot in the streets should be making the news,” Morgan said.

“Because all of the victims were prostitutes,” I explained. Morgan still looked confused. “Prostitutes are considered to be social outcasts— a lower class of society. We can’t even begin to guess how many sex workers are murdered per year because they’re hardly ever reported. The news would rather report on the six educated and successful women— according to society’s standards— that have been killed over the eight sex workers because most view the murders of sex workers as a ‘cleaning up the streets’ type of thing.”

“There’s a pattern,” Reid spoke up, changing the topic. “Every time the Hollow Man kills, the Mill Creek Killer kills shortly after.”

Gideon was the one to ask the right question: “So are they competing or are they partners in crime?”

“That’s what we’re supposed to figure out,” Hotch answered. “Wheels up in thirty.”

* * *

The team lined up in front of the steps that lead up into the jet. Gideon was first, then Spencer, Morgan, JJ, Hotch, and me. Gideon and Spencer took the four seats at the table for themselves, each sitting on opposite sides. Morgan took the single seat facing the cockpit, and JJ took the single seat across from him. All that was left was the pair of seats in the back with the small table.

Hotch and I worked our way back there with our bags. I propped my bag on the armrest of the couch while I reached up to open the overhead compartment. The latch popped and Hotch looked up from his bag to see what I was doing. When he realized that I was stretching up to reach it, he looked at the bottom of my dress to see it riding up my thighs.

He got close to me, using the small space of the plane as an excuse to do so. “Not in that dress, you don’t. Sit down. Inside seat. Now.”

Remember when I said earlier that my behavior was going to bite me in the ass at some point? Yeah, well, that time had officially come. We had about a two hour flight ahead of us, and we all knew that there was only a certain amount of work we could do while trapped on that plane. There was going to be plenty of time for him to get back at me— even though I was still technically just getting back at him for torturing me nearly all weekend. I anything, he’s just encouraging this cycle!

As his tone changed to the darker, more demanding voice he used when he wanted to be stern with me, I fell quiet. I knew I was on thin ice and now I had to obey. So that was what I did. 

I fell down off my tiptoes, dropped my arms to my sides, and nodded. “Yes, Sir.”

He didn’t even compliment my manners before I turned to take my seat. That meant I was royally fucked. I tried to gauge his demeanor after I walked away. Some small part of me was hoping that my obedience was enough to diffuse the tension and we were square now. But that was as far from the truth as it could get. Hotch angrily stored away our bags in the compartment before slamming it shut. Everyone in the plane jumped at the sound before going back to their work.

Hotch unbuttoned his suit jacket before sitting down next to me. He slid one of the case files in front of me and put the other one in front of himself. He didn’t open his and I didn’t move. My heart was starting to race and my skin felt hot and on edge. I felt like one little touch and I’d melt into a puddle for him. One little touch was all it would take and I would have knelt in front of him and everyone else on the plane if he asked me to.

“I know what you’re doing, brat. Everyone knows. Don’t pretend you don't. I might as well just write it on your forehead. But you’d like that; wouldn’t you?”

I swallowed hard. “Yes, Sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The plane's engines revved up and we started moving on the taxiway. I grabbed a lock of my wavy black hair and started playing with it anxiously. Hotch took note of this out of the corner of his eye and he inquired about why I was doing it. When I asked him what he meant, Hotch clarified with: “You only play with your hair like that when you’re bored or anxious and you’re clearly enjoying yourself today. So what’s wrong?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.”

I picked up another section of my hair and continued playing with it. “I still don’t like taking off.”

To clarify something, Hotch and I didn’t normally sit together. He had taken a lot of initiative towards making sure that our relationship didn’t impact our work. He didn’t want to distract us and he didn’t want to make the team uncomfortable. It was understandable, but it was small things like this that he missed when he was actively trying to avoid me at work sometimes. This was the first time he had spotted me playing with my hair on the plane— or at least the first time he had brought it up for me.

As the plane started thrusting forward down the runway, Hotch took my hand and held it tight. No one was looking over at us, so he took the opportunity to kiss my temple. The best part of my relationship with Hotch were these moments where our dynamic got to shine at full light. Despite me being a playful pain in the ass all day, and he was trying to punish me for it, he took a moment to check on me and stay with me when I had other things on my mind. I loved him and how he was so able to switch between the personalities he had around me: boss, Sir, and boyfriend. 

When the plane was at altitude, Hotch pulled his hand away. “Are you alright?” I nodded. “Good. Stay here.”

“You’re still mad?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. Sir was staring at me now. No one else.

“Work first, then I’ll deal with you.” He walked over to the couch and sat on the end which was closest to the rest of the team. They all turned their heads to give him their full attention. “We’re going to have to split up if we’re going to catch these guys before they kill more women.”

“JJ should head the liaison position with the local police department because she knows the most about the Mill Creek Killer. I’ll take the field position,” Gideon offered, flipping through the crime scene photos of the Mill Creek Killer’s victims.

“I’ll go with you,” Morgan said. Gideon nodded, agreeing to the idea.

“I’d actually like to go with JJ to look over all of the evidence,” Spencer insisted. "I want to figure out how these guys can be polar opposites yet know each other so well. There has got to be a common link somewhere, right? I’d like to start by looking at the original copy of the Hollow Man’s letter and see if I can complete some handwriting analysis and psycho linguistics. Maybe we’d be able to build a faster profile that way.”

“That’s a good idea,” Hotch complimented. “Y/N and I will head to the precinct, see what information we can gather from the local force, then go to speak with Mr. Carroll.”

“After I meet with Detective Sheridan, I’ll talk with Jim Meyers to see what he knows about the Hollow Man,” JJ said.

“Good. We need to get ahead of this. Guys like this are looking for the attention and the validation that they don’t get elsewhere in their lives, so they turn to murder and other crimes. Mr. Meyers posting about the Hollow Man is only encouraging his behavior. If we can get Meyers on our side, we can control how the Hollow Man is perceived in the papers, which might coax him out— and since we know that their murders are always connected, we can hopefully get the Mill Creek Killer to make a mistake, too.”

“We’re playing a waiting game now,” Spencer added. Everyone nodded agreements.

“Just keep searching what we have in the files for now. That’s all we can do until we land. Whatever we can take with us to the police will help us immensely in the long run. It sounds like we have a plan, though. I’m not too concerned. Keep working and we’ll break off when we get to St. Louis.” Hotch stood from his seat on the couch and patted Gideon’s shoulder as he passed by on his way back to me. He calmly sat back down next to me and opened the case file up. “Who can see you?”

“Spencer can see my eyes. JJ can see everything.”

He understood that JJ was the only problem, but he also had a solution. “You must be cold.” I raised a brow. “In that dress. You must be cold. Take my jacket.” He peeled it off his shoulders and laid it over my legs under the table. “Set the folder up in your lap as a shield.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Put your hand in your lap like we’re holding hands.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Don’t move or make a sound.”

“Yes—“ I stopped myself before I could finish. He let it go this once.

I watched ahead to make sure no one was looking over; meanwhile, Hotch was staring down at the open file on the table in front of him. I tried to steady my breathing and keep myself quiet as Hotch’s right hand drifted into my lap. It rested on my thigh, on top of his coat, just next to my hand, behind the file. No one would think twice if they looked over. They would only assume that we were holding hands, just as he had set up the scene for.

Once he knew that I was practically praying to prevent myself from bucking my hips for some friction, Hotch’s hand dove under the jacket and pulled my dress up. Without hesitation, Hotch grabbed my left thigh and untangled my legs for me. Using just the one hand, he spread my legs wide enough for him to have entire access to.

My breath hitched and I bit my lip as his index finger ghosted over my clit through my panties and tights. He did it again, this time with even less pressure. The feeling made my skin crawl with desperation, but I dug my nails into the armrest on my right side and I stayed as still as I could.

Hotch added his middle finger and dragged a slow line from my clit down to my core with his nails. I cursed under my breath and tried to look out the window in order to hide it, but he must have caught me because he halted his actions and grabbed the inside of my thigh. When I turned back to him to prove that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, he continued. His fingers returned to my clit to rub circles over the nub with hardly any pressure.

It was endless torture. It was enough to make me wet, and it was enough to make me needy for him, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to get me close. I couldn’t even feel an orgasm building, that was how slow and light he went. It was like he was trying to tell me: “I’m here. But that’s all.” He loved to do this to me. He knew how much it pissed me off, but he knew how it affected me, too. If he did this for long enough, I would break. For example, the weekend break we had just come back from. We probably spent more time in the bedroom than anywhere else, to be honest. And his teasing just never ended. That was why I was trying to get back at him, but it backfired, if you couldn’t tell.

And then he started going faster.

My hips jolted against his touch and a quiet sigh passed my lips. I instantly realized what I did and I prayed that he didn’t notice or would let it go. I looked at his eyes, but he was still focused on the file in front of him. That was a close one, I supposed. Or maybe he did it on purpose, and he did, in fact, notice. Maybe he was still testing me. Right now I had only mildly broken the rules, but I was still trying to obey like my life depended on it. So maybe he was trying to figure out what would make me finally break down in front of our friends. How far could he go? How cruel could he be?

My mind was spinning while I tried to profile him while also staying focused on my tasks. Here was what I knew about Hotch in that moment: One, he was pretending to focus on the file, but with the precise and tactical movements he was making, I knew that he wasn’t actually paying attention to them in that moment. Two, his free hand— his left one— was propped on the armrest and he was hiding his mouth with his index finger curled and pressed in front of it. He wasn’t just focusing on me. My eyes wandered and I saw that he was getting hard. Three—

His ring finger joined his index and middle fingers on my clit and he suddenly added an adequate amount of pressure and speed that felt absolutely euphoric. Every thought I had promptly left my mind and I moaned quietly, “Aaron…”

He tsked his tongue and pulled his hand away entirely. “You know that was a bad idea.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And, yet, you did it anyways.”

“What did you expect?”

Hotch pulled his eyes away from the file and looked at me. His pupils were dark and dilated, which meant that no matter how he could possibly attempt to deny it, he was enjoying this. He liked that I failed. He liked that he got to torture me like this.

I pulled the jacket off my legs, “I’m not cold anymore.” As I went to pass the jacket over, I dodged his attempt to grab it and laid it over his lap. My fingers “accidentally” ran down his hard length through his pants. Having not seen the action coming, Hotch was completely unable to stop himself from groaning and shifting in his seat. “Sorry. _Accident_.”

Hotch cleared his throat and looked around the plane to make sure no one saw. When the coast was clear, he leaned in real close to my ear and whispered, “You’ll regret that.” He kissed my jaw before pulling back. “I’ll handle _this_ myself.”

“You sure you don’t want a hand?” I smirked.

“I don’t remember ever telling you that you could speak now.”

I immediately stopped. He had me there. But, hey, I was already in this hole I had dug for myself and there was no way I was getting out of it any time soon. Might as well keep digging, right?

“What are you going to do about it? You already tried one thing. What’s plan b?”

Hotch’s brows furrowed together but his eyes were busy, working through problems he was none too happy with. He was thinking about how he was going to proceed without drawing attention to us. Falling short of an answer, he silently stood and walked to the bathroom just behind us.

I sank in my chair and sighed.

A few minutes later, Aaron returned to his seat. He had reslicked his hair back, put his jacket back on, and fixed his posture. My eyes followed his as he sat down and picked up his file again. Word from the pilot rang a few minutes later that we would be landing in about ten minutes.

* * *

After the plane landed, we all got up from our seats to retrieve our bags and head out. Spencer and JJ were gone in a flash, while Gideon and Morgan took their time to review their plan for the day again. Hotch and I, on the other hand, were still collecting ourselves by the time everyone was off the plane. With no one around, I went for another attempt at the overhead compartment. I didn’t do it to push Hotch’s buttons, though. I genuinely figured that we were in a rush to meet Spencer and JJ in the car since we were all headed to the police precinct.

As I got a hold of the handle on my bag, I felt Hotch come up right behind me. His front was pressed to my back to the point that I could feel the outline of his cock touching my ass through both of our clothes. I gasped at the feeling, my knees buckling and my hand falling from above to the wall for balance.

“Something wrong?” he asked innocently while reaching over me for his own bag. I cursed him silently for being so much taller than me as he easily lifted the bag over my head before letting it fall at his side. He pressed into me once more for extra measure as he pushed past me to step off the plane.

I took a moment to myself to catch my breath and collect my thoughts before reaching up again for my bag. Hotch was waiting for me at the exit with a wicked grin that told me he knew exactly what he was doing and he was enjoying every second of it.

When we stepped off the plane, we saw Reid and JJ already heading off in one car, and Gideon and Morgan were piling into the next car. Hotch and I looked at the last available vehicle, which was an SUV stretched into a limousine.

Hotch ran down the steps of the jet and over to Gideon. “What the hell is this?” he asked, gesturing to the limo.

Gideon shrugged, “They said it’s the only other vehicle they could send out here. They’ll give you Reid and JJ’s when you get to the station.”

“Why couldn’t we have just ridden with Reid and JJ?” I questioned, walking down the steps myself.

“Reid was in a rush to get to the letter, I guess. What does it matter? It’s just a car. You’re not driving it, for god’s sake.” He laughed to himself as he slid into the car and closed the door. He waved to us as the driver drove off with them.

“Come on,” Hotch said, leading the way to the last car. The SUV limousine. 

Hotch opened my door for me and waited until I was situated inside to close the door for me. He hurried around the back of the car and got in on the other side. Just as the door slammed shut, the driver put his foot on the gas and we were off. While I was watching the drive through the front windshield, Hotch was inspecting the car for something specific. 

When he couldn’t find what he was looking for, Hotch resorted to asking the driver, “Does this vehicle have a partition?” The driver looked at Hotch through the rearview mirror before nodding then pressing a button on the console. The partition between us and the driver’s seat rolled up slowly. Once it was all the way up, Hotch started fiddling with his belt buckle. “Come here.”

Eagerly, I scooted more towards him and tucked my hair behind my ears. His hard cock sprang free from his pants before he fisted my hair into a handmade ponytail and coaxed my head down. Though I went to gently lick his tip, or maybe even the length of his shaft, Hotch wasn’t having any of it. The second my mouth reached his tip, he pushed my mouth all the way down on him. I moaned around him, which earned the response of his grip on my hair tightening. He bobbed my head for me. I was just the tool he was using to get off. He finally had me alone to fuck his anger out in a way that wouldn’t give me in a relief, and he took it.

His head fell against the headrest as he let out a quiet moan. Sure, there was a partition between us and the driver, but it wasn’t like the thing was sound proof. If we were any louder than how we already were, there was no doubt that we would get caught.

“Just like that. Don’t stop.”

It wasn’t like I could stop given how he was holding me and how he was fucking his hips up to make sure that I took every inch of him in my mouth as I could fit. At the pace he was going, I knew that he wasn’t trying to last long or to savor the feeling. He was doing one thing and one thing only: showing me who was boss. After my little snip back on the plane, I deserved it, to be honest. And I wasn’t exactly arguing against it either, now was I?

“I’m gonna cum…”

Just as he called it, his thrusts sputtered as he came in my mouth. He bit back a groan, which was certainly going to be much louder had he not held himself back. When he had finished releasing every drop into my mouth, he pulled me back up by my hair and he took my chin between his thumb and index finger until I was looking at him again. “Swallow all of it. Now.” I did as I was told then stuck out my tongue to prove it. “Good girl.” He wiped my lip clean with his thumb. “Good girl,” he repeated, this time more worn out and relieved. He buckled his pants back up and I turned to return to my side of the car. I leaned against the window, still watching him, and I smirked. “What?”

“You gave in,” I laughed.

“You didn’t get anything out of it, though.”

“Didn’t I?”

He lifted his head off the headrest. “You—” He smiled back. “Touché.”

I winked, "I love you.”

He reached out for me and took my hand. “I love you, too.”


	8. THE TWO CASES IN ST. LOUIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Descriptions of murder and kidnapping. All around mature content!
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 09. Right after part seven.

It was as though nothing had happened in the car ride over as Hotch and I got out and hurried into the St. Louis police precinct that had requested our help on these two cases. Inside, we were greeted by a large lobby made of sandstone colored marble. On either side of the entrance, the two walls were lined with seats for visitors. Nearly half way into the lobby, there were two columns protruding from the wall, and between them was a security checkpoint. They had metal detectors run by two officers. One sat at a desk, the other stood at the detectors for extra monitoring or for pat downs, if necessary.

As we approached the checkpoint, the officer sitting at the desk asked for our identifications. Both Hotch and I pulled out our FBI ID cards and flashed them in front of the man. The officer’s demeanor changed in an instant after he realized who we were. He fixed his posture and forced a smile onto his face before telling us that we were free to enter with our weapons, then turned to the other officer to order him to let us through without any hassle. At the kindness of the officers, we thanked them while putting our badges away.

The metal detectors sounded their alarms as we passed through. Everyone standing in the lobby turned to look at us after the sirens made them jump. Hotch and I didn’t look to them to apologize or to explain what was going on. We just kept walking with the intention of getting what we needed for the investigation before heading back out into the field. Hotch had built this plan in his head that we were going to meet with the lead detective to gather information from him, then we would go to ask Mr. Carroll some questions about his wife’s disappearance. I just so happened to be along for the ride.

Up ahead, there was a man watching us pass through security. He had a badge on his hip and a classified file in his hands. He certainly looked like the guy we needed to speak with, so Hotch approached.

“Agent Hotchner, I take it,” the man said.

Hotch shook the man’s hand, “Correct.”

“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Detective Sheridan. I’m in charge of both of these cases.”

“Thank you for reaching out to us, detective. This is my partner, Agent Greenaway. We’re going to be handling the Mill Creek Killer case. We were hoping to look through some of the evidence your team has collected before we go to talk with Mr. Carroll.”

“Sure thing. Follow me.”

Detective Sheridan led the way into the main office. The precinct was crowded and busy as officers hurried around and civilians tried to navigate their way around to see the officer they were told to meet with. Sheridan, however, moved around with expertise and ease. He knew his way between each of the desks and could guess where people would be walking and when so as to avoid any collision.

“Where is the rest of our team?” I asked. “We were supposed to meet them here.”

“They already left,” Sheridan explained.

“They already left?” Hotch questioned for clarification.

The detective nodded. “Unfortunately, we don’t have much more than the single file we sent to your office when it comes to the Hollow Man case. They took our original copy of the case file and left without another word about where they were going or what they’re doing.”

“Certainly sounds like Gideon. Please tell me you have more for us than just a single file.”

“Oh, yeah,” he chuckled.

When we reached the back of the main office, we were standing outside of a glass walled boardroom that had the blinds drawn shut from the inside. The detective pulled a keyring from his pocket and sorted through the identical keys until he found the one he was looking for. After unlocking the door and opening it wide for us, Hotch and I stepped into the boardroom to find the walls covered with crime scene photos, leads, maps, connections, etc. Sitting in the middle of the room was a table covered with boxes of evidence, and stacked on top of them were papers upon papers.

“All this and you only had one file for the other case?” I whispered, only loud enough to Hotch to really hear.

“If you guys need to review any physical evidence from the crime scenes, you’re going to have to check it out from the evidence locker downstairs.”

Hotch nodded an acknowledgement. “Our associate, Dr. Reid, wanted to review the Hollow Man’s original letter.”

Sheridan had the answer prepared before Hotch could finish. “He’s already downstairs.”

“Good.” He turned to me quickly, “Y/N, grab what you think we’ll need to meet with Mr. Carroll and we’ll head out.” He turned back to Detective Sheridan, “Supposedly we’re going to have a car that we can drive around ourselves?”

“Right. I’ll get that sorted for you here. Just give me a moment.” Detective Sheridan patted the door frame before hurrying to his desk.

I approached the table and started sorting through everything. It seemed like someone had just dumped everything in one big pile and didn’t bother to put anything together the way it should have been. It just meant that Spencer would likely have to go through all of it while we were gone. I felt almost bad for him, but I knew that he would speed through it without breaking a sweat.

Hotch closed the boardroom door. “Find the files you want then go change.”

I looked up at him, “You aren’t serious.”

“Does it look like I’m joking?”

I rolled my eyes slightly and looked back down at the folders and loose papers scattered in front of me. “Fine.”

* * *

On our way to Tom and Ellen Carroll’s house in the suburbs, I looked over some of the files we decided to bring with us. Anything I found to be noteworthy was immediately relayed to Hotch as he drove. For the most part, we already knew most of what was in the files, especially concerning the disappearance of Ellen Carroll. We knew that Mr. Carroll was likely still trying to cope with the situation he was now finding himself trapped in, and we knew that could possibly mean that he wouldn’t be interested in speaking with us for too long, so we had to prepare our questions ahead of time and make sure that they were precise. Even if the local police had already asked him the questions we prepared, it was important for him to tell us everything he knew personally for a couple of reasons. One, he could have possibly remembered something more important after the fact. Two, his story could change and we might be able to catch him in a lie. Three, being able to hear his answers and watch him as he answered them would allow us to profile him and see if we could gain any more information about the case through his nonverbal responses.

Hotch wanted me to lead the questioning because he felt that a “female touch” would help us connect with him better. He would start by introducing us so as to set the nature of our dynamic, but I would proceed with the questions while he would try to silently build a profile for Mr. Carroll if we needed to.

As we parked on the curb in front of the Carrolls’ house, I took note of where we were in relation to the city. We were in a nice, gated community of large and expensive houses. The Carrolls’ house, specifically, stood out among the others as it was at the end of the road and therefore had the largest floor plan and backyard. The Carrolls must have been disgustingly rich to afford such a place.

But we weren’t the only ones parked in front of the house. Cars lined the curbs on both sides of the road, and they were all parked like they were trying to get as close to the Carrolls’ as possible, which proved that the cars were there for them and no one else.

“Normally, you wouldn’t just throw a party or gathering if your wife is still missing,” Hotch noted aloud. I agreed as we met up on the paved sidewalk and started walking towards the house. When we arrived at the front door, Hotch reached to the left and pressed on the doorbell. Not even a few seconds later, as if we were being expected, the door opened to reveal a disheveled man standing there while trying to press a faux smile onto his face. “Mr. Carroll? I’m S.S.A Hotchner and this is Agent Greenaway.” We showed our badges briefly. “We’re with the FBI. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions about your wife’s disappearance?”

The man nodded and opened the door further for us as a gesture that we were allowed to enter his home. Hotch and I bowed our heads slightly in response as we stepped inside. Mr. Carroll closed the door behind us.

“The police keep asking me questions… I figured that I’d be getting a visit from you guys soon,” he explained as he led us through his home. As we followed, we passed the parlor where a large family was gathered together. All wearing black except for Mr. Carroll.

“Mr. Carroll, could you run us through that day for us? We understand that the police have already gone through this with you a couple of times, but we want to get the information from you ourselves so that we can proceed properly.”

“I mean, everything was fairly normal about that day until Ellen was gone. We headed straight from here to the park with Katie at about 11AM. We were playing catch in the park for awhile until she said that she was going to start setting up the picnic lunch we had brought with us. That was the last time I saw her.”

“Did anything seem off about her?” I inquired. “Did she say anything odd? Perhaps she seemed distracted or nervous?”

Mr. Carroll shook his head vigorously, “No, no, no. I mean, we had just been talking about having another kid right before she left for the picnic bench. She seemed ecstatic about the idea and was happy that Katie was alright with it, too. But when she went missing, my first thought was maybe that she got spooked by the idea and needed a moment to herself to think about it. But when she didn’t come back, I knew that something was wrong.”

“You were talking about having another kid while you guys were playing catch at the park?” Hotch clarified.

“That’s right. Why?”

Hotch and I shared a look that meant we both knew what was going on, and then he made a silent gesture for me to explain. As the female looking part of the duo, the news was likely to be taken better if coming from me. At least that was how it always ended working out. “We believe that the man who took your wife is only going after women who seem successful with their careers and their families. It’s possible that the suspect heard you discussing having another child and decided based on that information that your wife was a perfect victim.”

“Did you notice anyone suspicious? He could have looked entirely harmless, but he would have been hanging out nearby for a little too long.”

“No. Nothing. It wasn’t on my mind to look for anyone out of the ordinary. I was just trying to focus on my family. I don’t understand how—”

Just then, as Mr. Carroll was about to ask a question that had been weighing heavily on his mind, the sound of small feet pattering down the staircase echoed above us. We turned to see Katie, the Carrolls’ daughter, coming downstairs with her teddy bear in hand. Mr. Carroll tried to smile again for his daughter as she ran and jumped into his arms. He groaned playfully as he picked her up.

“Well, who’s this?” I asked with a tone an octave higher than I normally used. That’s what you do with kids, right? Talk like you’re one of them so as to make them comfortable and think that you’re their friend. “Are you Katie?” The girl nodded before hiding her face in her father’s shoulder. “It’s nice to meet you, Katie. My name’s Y/N.” She stared at me out the corner of her eye while keeping his nose still tucked away. “This man and I are trying to find your mom for you. Can I ask you a few questions about her?” Katie nodded again. “Do you know what happened to her?” She shook her head. “When you guys were at the park yesterday, did you see anyone who looked funny or scary?” She shook her head again. “Do you remember where she went after she said she was going to set up your lunch?” Still no helpful answer.

Katie sat up straight now, though. Her dad turned slightly so that she could look straight at me without having to strain her neck. “When’s my mommy coming home?” she asked me.

My shoulders fell as my heart sank. I hadn’t expected that. I mean, I should have seen it coming, yet I didn’t. It was a valid question, of course, but I was falling short of giving any kind of answer that would suffice in the situation and for my target audience.

Mr. Carroll caught my hesitation and stepped in. As he put Katie back down on her feet, he looked down at her and told her to go play with her cousins in the next room. Katie didn’t think twice before running off as she was told. When he looked back up, Mr. Carroll’s face was red like he was about to cry. “What kind of monster would take away a mother from her child and growing family, Agent Greenaway?”

I swallowed hard to hide my hesitation again. “We’re going to find out, Mr. Carroll.” I looked back at Hotch, but he was staring at the open parlor where Katie was playing with her cousins as the rest of the guests in the room chatted. “What is it?” I whispered to him.

Hotch turned back to Mr. Carroll, “Who’s in the parlor?”

Mr. Carroll’s attention was drawn to that direction to see what caught Hotch’s eye before he answered. “After mine and Ellen’s families found out that she went missing, they all flew out here to help me with Katie as the investigation began.”

“Why are they all wearing black like they just went to a funeral, but not you?”

“The police keep telling me that it’s very likely that my wife is still alive and that I should hold out hope that she’ll come home safely. However, our families don’t seem to share the same hope as I do. They’ve been treating me like a widower since they arrived…” Mr. Carroll finally broke into tears after holding it back since we walked through the front door. He turned away to hide his emotions in shame.

Hotch nodded his head towards the front door, a gesture that it was time for us to take our leave silently. Before we could thank Mr. Carroll for his time, though, he left to be on his own and to make sure that Katie didn’t see him crying. In that case, Hotch and I headed back to the car.

As we stepped out into the fresh air and I closed the door behind us, I told Hotch what I had been thinking about ever since Mr. Carroll told us about the last conversation he had with his wife. I mention the fact that we know more about the Unsubs MO now. He only went after women who were clearly educated, successful, and had families to go home to. All of his victims match that description. And I brought up the fact that the Unsub wouldn’t have to stalk the victims for this information because he’s been grabbing them in public after hearing them talk about it or seeing them do it. That doesn’t require anything more than eavesdropping on private conversations for a few minutes.

Hotch asked how the Unsub could get close enough to the victims beforehand to be sure— like he surely did with Ellen Carroll.

“He blends in somehow. Maybe he brings a dog to the park, throws the toy a little too close to the Carrolls and has to walk over in order to retrieve it.”

“Or he just somehow looks welcoming.”

Regardless, we knew that couples only really discussed having more kids if they both had supporting jobs and a sufficient home to raise a family in— not a starter one like younger couples would have. They needed to have been entirely committed to the idea of expanding their family, and they would only do that if both Mr. and Mrs. Carroll had well paying jobs.

So the Unsub knew that the victim and her family were wealthy and successful, hence he knew that she was well educated. He would have also seen Ellen playing with Katie in the park, making it clear that she had a family to go home to. She made a perfect target and the Unsub likely didn’t even have to watch her for more than an hour. I was sure that once he most likely heard them discussing the prospect of having another child, he knew that he was going to kill Ellen Carroll.

Hotch opened his car door, but he didn’t get in yet. He looked at me over the roof of the car. “If what you’re saying about him not having to stalk them is true, then the Unsub could attack at any time.” I nodded. “So we’re racing against the clock now.”

We both slid into the car simultaneously and Hotch didn’t hesitate to start the car and maneuver us out of the narrow street. Until we could get out of the neighborhood, Hotch had to drive slowly and carefully; but once we would get onto the highway, we could start racing back to the office. It was only a matter how long it would take to navigate the maze of the neighborhood we were in.

I was looking back down at the case files we had brought with us, but my mind was elsewhere. The pain in Mr. Carroll’s voice when reflecting about his wife and the plans they were making for their future together continued to ring in my ears. And the way he broke down in the end was an image I couldn’t shake for the oddest reason. It made me think about Hotch and Jack. I wondered to myself how I would handle Mr. Carroll’s situation if I were in his shoes. What would I tell Jack? How would I tell Jack? How long would I hold onto hope for?

And for it to all come crashing down after him and Mrs. Carroll were excited about taking the next step in their lives… I couldn’t imagine.

“Are you alright?” Hotch spoke up.

I lifted my gaze up from the file in my lap and looked at him. “I’m just thinking.”

“About?”

“Have you ever thought about having another kid?” I realized afterwards how I said it and what it insinuated. My voice had fluctuated in the wrong place, an audible sign that I meant something more behind my words. Not meaning to put him in an awkward position where he might feel like I was cornering him, I decided to clarify. “I mean, in general. With anyone. I just feel like it would be really hard in our line of wor—”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Y/N.”

I took a moment to pause and watch him. He was genuinely mad at me for bringing it up. “I’m sorry—”

“We need to stay focused on this case.”

I relaxed into the back of my seat as though I were trying to blend in with the rest of the car. I fucked up. I knew it. I crossed some kind of line, some kind of boundary that I hadn’t foreseen, and it got under his skin. In a whispered tone, I said that I was sorry again before turning to the window to watch as we passed the last few houses in the neighborhood.

Just then, as if saved by the bell, my phone started ringing. I eagerly dug it out of my purse, hoping for some good news or some kind of distraction from the tension building between me and Hotch. One quick glance at the Caller ID and I answered the call by name.

“What’s up, JJ?”

“We just got a call down here at the precinct. They found Ellen Carroll’s body.”

My eyes slowly fell shut as I tried to process the news. That little girl we just saw and promised to help just lost her mother. “Send me the address.”

“That’s the thing, Y/N/N, she was found in the middle of the woods, just like all of the previous victims. I can send you the coordinates, though. You can drive up there and meet us at the crime scene.”

“Alright, thanks, JJ.” She hung up first, so I turned my phone off and stowed it away. “We’ve got a problem.” Hotch raised a brow while still watching the road. “They just found Ellen Carroll’s body. JJ’s sending us the coordinates.”

“Shit,” Hotch sighed, defeated.

My phone buzzed again, this time with a text from JJ, giving us the coordinates to where the body was found. I opened up the map that was tucked away in the glove compartment and marked the location. Hotch peeked over for a short moment to get an idea of where he was going before making a right hand turn onto the main street.

* * *

A park ranger was waiting at the head of the trail for us as we got out of the car. The trail parking lot was full with marked and undercover cop cars. Hotch didn’t care, though. He drove straight into the middle of the lot and just decided to park there. The ranger watched us with a look that told me he didn’t much care for suits— and I couldn’t blame him. Rangers were underappreciated and we always had a tendency to step on their toes. They didn’t like us and we didn’t really pay any mind to them. But this guy made sure we knew that he didn’t like us.

Hotch and I hardly stopped as we approached the trail. The park ranger turned before we could introduce ourselves, and he started leading us to where the body was found. About ten minutes down the main path was when we deviated from it. The ranger held an overgrown thornbush back aws Hotch and I stepped into the woods with him.

Another ten minutes deep into the woods and we reached a clearing which was crowded with police officers and coroners. JJ and Spencer were already standing around the body, watching the local coroner as she took pictures of any marks on the skin.

As we stepped into the clearing, JJ noticed us and came to explain everything to Hotch. Meanwhile, I walked past to take a look at the body myself. Mrs. Carroll’s body laid in the epicenter of the clearing, every part of her but her face covered by a mountain of leaves. While I crouched down beside the body, I requested a pair of medical gloves from the coroner. She turned to the bag to her left and pulled out two blue rubber gloves for me. She then began to explain her findings and I put on the gloves.

There was a newbie on the force, apparently, and he was the first on the scene. She explained to me that the newbie didn’t follow protocol and started to investigate the body himself. He uncovered the body and took note of the bruises on her body before Detective Sheridan showed up and stopped him. The way I was seeing Mrs. Carroll now was a recreation of how the newbie remembered finding her. Meaning, it wouldn’t actually be identical. Meaning, any actual positioning of the body that the Mill Creek Killer originally intended was gone, and with it left our potential profile.

I then politely asked if she had a cotton swab. When she asked why, I didn’t respond. I was too caught up in hypothesising about what I had discovered. Once I had the swab, I gently dragged it along Mrs. Carroll’s cold lips to find that wet lipstick stuck to the cotton.

“Hotch!” I called. He excused himself from speaking with JJ, Spencer, and Detective Sheridan. When I had his attention, I looked up at him and showed him what was in my hand. “The lipstick is fresh.”

Hotch looked at the rest of the scene that the Mill Creek Killer set up for us. His eyes were searching in no particular direction, which told me that he was thinking long and hard about what kind of profile we could build off of this. “He covered the body to keep her safe from the elements. She won’t decay as quickly when she’s like this. Why?”

“To come back,” I answered, twisting the swab between my fingers. “Think about it, this guy goes to all this trouble to take a woman in broad daylight and in a public setting, then drags her into the woods to kill her. Yet, she’s laying here like Snow White. Her hair is brushed back, she’s wearing fresh lipstick, and her eyes are still open. He wants to—”

“He wants to spend time alone with her.”

“Detective Sheridan,” I called again. All three of them: JJ, Spencer, and Sheridan came back over to listen. “When you’ve found the other bodies, were they presented like this? Why wasn’t it in any of the files?”

He shook his head, “Because we didn’t know. Every time we’ve found another body, it has already decomposed, for the most part. I don’t understand why it matters. We already knew that the guy is a creep. What’s so special about making the body look nice?”

Spencer stepped forward with the answer, “Because it means that he has a ritual. Every time he kills, he _has_ to defile the bodies or else the whole act feels useless. If he were to just kill these women then dump their bodies somewhere, the itch he feels for murder wouldn’t gain any relief. By preparing the bodies in a way that’s visually appealing to him, he has completed the act entirely and he can feel at peace for a short while before the urge to kill returns.”

“That’s how we’re going to catch him,” I said. I peeled off one of my gloves and reached out for Hotch’s help standing up. “I have a profile for him.” Hotch took my bare hand and pulled me up.

“Already?” JJ questioned.

I nodded and peeled off my other glove. “Detective Sheridan, if you could have all your men gather at the precinct as soon as possible, we’d like to present our suspect’s profile to them.”

He shrugged and nodded, not entirely sure why he was calling everyone together, but knew that he had to do it regardless. Our team moved out of the forest together as the coroner and her team bagged the body for further examination back at their office. Spencer and I led the way, exchanging what information we had.

Before leaving the precinct for the Carroll crime scene, Spencer had been busy working on the Hollow Man case, but he had determined enough to build a profile, too. Granted, the Hollow Man seemed to be easier to profile, despite the fact that they had far less evidence for that case compared to ours.

He then asked me how I figured out the rest of the Mill Creek Killer’s profile while examining Mrs. Carroll’s body. I explained to Spencer in the forest the exact same information that I later told the entire precinct when we arrived back in the city:

Starting from the beginning of his hunt, we began to dissect our Unsub’s behavior and what he would look like. Based on the patterns of how his victims went missing, we knew that he would appear entirely harmless. He could have perhaps been very attractive or been using a pet to give the appearance of innocence while in public.

All of the victims went with him willingly, which meant that he seemed trustworthy. Because he preyed on women who had families, he could also have been operating under the ruse that his child has gone missing and he needs help locating them. Based on outside source scientific research done about the perception of trustworthy people, we could assume that he was in his late twenties to early thirties.

He’d be handsome and extremely charismatic. He wouldn’t be a social outcast and he wouldn’t be in a relationship or job that he didn’t enjoy. It was appropriate to assume that he would have a job where he would get to speak to women a fair amount, which was how he would be comfortable enough to approach them in public and in broad daylight.

I explained to the room full of police officers and detectives as I had to Hotch earlier, that our Unsub didn’t need to hide and stalk his victims. He was quick thinking and would always choose then take them within a few hours of seeing them. He would wait rather than stalk because the thrill was more exciting. He enjoyed the champion feeling of being able to successfully take these women when it should be nearly impossible.

When one of the officers interrupted me to ask how I could possibly know any of this, I simplified profiling by telling him that you can tell a lot about a person just by how they would stand and how they would dress. Even more so if you could hear them speak and see how they act under pressure. Our Unsub knew this information about basic profiling. I had originally assumed that he was acting out just by watching his victims interact with their families, but upon further investigation and discussion with Mr. Carroll, I realized that he was being very particular with who he chose. He could have taken any other woman in that park that day, yet he took the one who was discussing having another kid soon. That meant that he was being very specific and careful with his victims.

His victims always matched the same description: women who were medium height, medium build, pretty by society’s standards, and had dark hair— but he wasn’t specific with either black or brown. Either worked for him. Just so long as it was never blonde.

“Unfortunately, this means we can’t do anything but wait until he takes another victim,” Hotch clarified as he leaned against one of the desks in the back of the room. He had chosen to stay back and let me carry out the profile, and he hadn’t said anything yet until just then. “Our best chance of catching him is to catch him with a body while he’s completing the ritual of displaying the victim.”

With our profile presentation concluded, Morgan and Gideon stepped forward to give theirs. After both profiles had been officially released to the precinct, the team was told to go to the hotel to rest by Hotch and Gideon. None of us argued. It had been a hell of a day and we all looked exhausted. Personally, I knew that I wanted nothing more than a nice warm shower and to finally lay down again. But that wasn’t how it usually worked out, was it. We always said we were going to head to bed, and then we would all be up all night still working on the case. That was just an unspoken part of the job, I supposed.


	9. CONVERSATION ABOUT KIDS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Descriptions of murder and kidnapping. Being held hostage at gunpoint. All around mature content!
> 
> Timeline: Season 2 Episode 09. Day after part eight.

In the morning, Hotch drove me, JJ, and Spencer to the precinct from the hotel. We were up bright and early, but we were still way behind Gideon and Morgan, who must have left hours before us. Granted, they were hunting a killer who preyed at night, whereas we were searching for one in the day. It made sense that they needed to collect themselves and their itinerary for the day long before us.

After spending the day in the field yesterday, Hotch and I planned on taking some time to look over the evidence for any patterns or discrepancies which would help us catch the Mill Creek Killer. No one was perfect, not even our Unsub. He had to have made a mistake somewhere. There had to be something pointing us to him past just waiting to catch him in the act of performing his ritual. Realistically, that was what we had to do. But it was weighing on me, the guilt of letting another woman be taken and killed just so we could catch one man.

We all immediately got to work at the office. JJ found Mr. Meyers, the reporter who had contact with the Hollow Man, waiting in the lobby for her. They went off to discuss the Hollow Man separately, while Hotch, Spencer, and I continued on towards the boardroom. Sheridan was waiting there for us. It looked like he hadn’t even gone home at all. His clothes were the same as the day before, and his eyes looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.

Hotch noticed right away. He patted Sheridan’s shoulder to gain his attention, then told him to go home for a few hours. Sheridan, surprisingly, didn’t argue. He must have been waiting for us to come in to start working so that he could go rest.

Spencer went digging into one of the boxes for a piece of paper he wanted to scan; meanwhile, Hotch and I sat down at the table to start reviewing everything the detective and his team had collected before calling us in for help. Hotch was reading while reclining in his chair and mindlessly playing with the stubble on his chin.

I leaned back in my seat and put my feet up on the table. He didn’t even look up when he told me to put my feet down. I stared at him, almost daring him to look at me, but he didn’t. I went back to the papers I was evaluating and it took him another minute or so before he told me to put my feet down again. But he still didn’t look at me.

JJ burst into the boardroom and hurried over to us. We looked up at her to see the panic plastered to her face. “We just got a call about another missing woman. Merideth Dale. 25.”

I slid my feet off the table and sat up straight. “Does she match the appearance type of the other victims?”

“Perfectly. She was supposed to meet her friend for a bike ride this morning, but disappeared after calling from the trail.”

“Mark Twain National Forest?”

JJ nodded while handing both Hotch and I new case files. We both accepted them and hastily began flipping through the pages. There was a picture of Meredith Dale attached, and JJ was entirely right. She matched the description perfectly. It had to be our guy.

I flipped to the next page to find a mini map of where Meredith’s phone was found. She had been traveling on her bike along a fairly popular path before stopping at a bench to call her friend. That was where her friend found her phone and decided to call the police.

Spencer came back and Hotch caught him up to speed. I spun around in my chair to face the bigger map of the forest that was pinned to the wall. When I realized that the path was near where the second victim was found, I stood from my chair and approached the map so as to get a better look.

“What do you see?” Hotch questioned.

I squinted and got real close to the map before pointing to something with my index finger. I glided the tip of my nail along the paper as I followed the path Meredith was last seen on, all the way down to where the second body was found. Then I traced it to where the first victim was taken then found. And so on.

Hotch realized that I was spotting something important. He grabbed a spool of string from the table and came over. As I continued to trace the path between all of the victims, Hotch followed my finger with the string, marking the spots of the kidnappings and murders with pins. When we had marked all of them, I dropped my finger from the map and took a step back to get a clearer view of our work.

The Unsub was rotating between sectors of the park, but only a few number of them that were close to the highway. The paths he was taking and the sectors he was staying in were all easy to access and easy to escape from quickly. The parking lot nearby was huge, which meant that his car would blend in easily, and he had direct paths to the park where Ellen Carroll was taken, the bike path where Meredith Dale was taken, and all of the woods where the bodies were found.

But why rotate like that? And how the fuck had we missed this?

I snapped behind me while still staring at the map. “Spencer, call Garcia. Ask her to check the park rangers’ forest search schedules.”

“What are you thinking about?” Hotch asked me quietly.

I broke my concentration with the map for a second to make eye contact with Hotch. It was the first time that he had looked at me since I asked him about having more kids yesterday. For a moment, I got lost in his eyes. I didn’t think that I could miss them so much… Yet, even just a day without them made me yearn for all of his love. I thought about how I never wanted him to look away. But not all wishes come true. He broke eye contact first to look back at the map before I began my explanation.

“He’s staying relatively in the same area with the abductions and murders. And depending on the day, he takes the bodies to a certain sector of the forest,” I said.

“Yeah, but the first one is way deeper into the forest. It would take nearly three hours to get there, while the rest of them take not even an hour. So why the change after the first one?”

“He was nervous. He wanted to be cautious to not get caught with the first body because he was unsure of how to go about hiding it at that point. But once he knew what he was doing, he got more confident, and decided to stay closer for convenience and easy escape. And he only takes them from the most populated sectors, but takes them to the more secluded ones.”

“So, then, he knows about how the forest rangers operate. He knows when the parks open, when people will be around, when officers will be on patrol, and where to put the bodies so that they won’t be found for a few days. But how could he be sure that those sectors are safe?”

I pointed back at Spencer, who immediately took the cue to repeat what Garcia was saying over the phone. “The forest is broken up into six districts, and each of them are patrolled every…” Spencer paused as a realization dawned on him after Penelope told him something. He started interrupting and thanking Garcia for her help before hanging up and running to the map. “These sections are patrolled every three to five days, officially, but with department cutbacks, they’ve had to spread out the searches even more. Now they’re only being checked every five to eight days.”

“Approximately how long it took to find the bodies,” Hotch said, the realization dawning on him, too. “That’s why he’s rotating. He's dumping the bodies in the sectors that have just been checked so that he has the longest period of time to spend time with the bodies without being distrubed.”

“So we know where he’s going to dump Meredith Dale.”

“If he hasn’t already,” I added.

“The question is, where in the sector is he dumping the body? He can’t do it anywhere near where the last body was found.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem for him. The sectors are hundreds of square miles large. He could leave the body even five miles away from the first one and we still wouldn’t be able to find her in time,” Hotch said.

I turned away from the map and slowly went to sit back down. My mind was racing for answers. The Mill Creek Killer had to know that we were looking for him. And he had to know that we were close. He wouldn’t have rushed to take another woman if he didn’t think that way. That was his first mistake, though. He rushed and it gave us time to find him.

The mini map on the desk was staring at me for some reason. There was something I was missing in that map. Something important about where the Mill Creek Killer would have taken Meredith Dale. Where could he have taken her? Supposedly her friend was just up the path, which meant that right after the call ended, he would have approached her, taken her, and run before being seen.

The hiking path.

Just across from the bench where Meredith was last reported to have been was a small hiking path that led straight into the woods. It wasn’t a popular path, and it wasn’t clearly marked. Locals and experienced hikers liked to take it, though. At least that was what the park ranger explained to us yesterday when talking to us about the forest.

“Spencer, where does the path across from the bench where Ms. Dale went missing lead to?”

“Uh…” He started to trace the map. “Saltgrass Cove.”

“That’s where we’ll find her.” I stood back up, grabbed the case file, and hurried towards the door with Hotch and Spencer following closely.

Hotch drove the undercover cop car with the lights and sirens on. We arrived at the scene first, Sheridan and his team right behind us once we called from the car. By the time we got out of the car, found the path, and ran deep into the woods, the K-9 unit had released their dogs in search of a body.

We knew where we needed to look, it was just a matter of pinpointing the exact location. The dogs would certainly help, but we couldn’t just stand around while they searched. The team and the group of officers following us tried to keep up with me as I stepped off the path and started racing through the woods.

Hotch called after me to slow down, and I tried, but when we heard one of the search dogs barking south of our location, I started sprinting again. The dog kept barking to call over the entire force until his handler commanded him to stop.

I stopped at the edge of the clearing around Saltgrass Cove when I saw what the dog had found. Hotch came speeding up behind me, taking a few extra steps past before stopping, too. Spencer and JJ stopped behind us.

We were too late.

Meredith Dale’s body was lying in the middle of the clearing, covered with leaves, just as Ellen Carroll had been found. Only this time, Dale’s face wasn’t exposed. It could have been because the last body was tampered with before we got to the scene, or maybe it was because the Mill Creek Killer hadn’t come back yet to prepare or defile the body.

Detective Sheridan approached the body and pushed the leaves covering the face to the side. He cursed under his breath then started pushing the rest of the leaves away. Hotch sprang into action, running over and telling the detective to stop immediately. Sheridan halted, but didn’t move away. He looked up and Hotch asked why they shouldn’t examine the body.

“We need to leave the body as it is. He hasn’t completed the ritual yet, which means that he has to come back. And when he does, we’ll be here, waiting for him.” Hotch turned to the rest of the officers standing around, “Search the nearby area, find spots to hide in the treeline. If we’re going to catch the Mill Creek Killer at any point, it’s going to be today. Please, do not touch anything that you might think is evidence. Leave it all as it is for now. Once we catch this bastard, we’ll start to proceed with crime scene protocol.”

Everyone threw their hands up and groaned or sighed. They didn’t understand like we did how important it was to not touch a single thing. If the Mill Creek Killer was as smart as we profiled him to be, he would know if anything was out of place. Perhaps he would even know if one leaf on Meredith’s body was out of place. But by the time he would be able to get close enough to notice, we would have him. So Hotch leaned down and started covering the body again.

Everyone dispersed except for our team. We waited for Hotch to come talk to us. When he was done resetting the body, he dusted his hands off and approached us. “He’ll be back soon. She looked like she hasn’t been dead more than an hour or so. The blood was still fresh and her skin was only just now starting to grow cold. He’s rushing the process now, so we’ll likely see him in the next hour or so.”

“Should we set up watch times?” JJ questioned.

Hotch shook his head, “No. We need all eyes on this guy. It’s easier to trick people when they aren’t in large groups. We have the upperhand if we all stay. JJ and Spencer, why don’t you guys take up the north side of the clearing, Y/N and I will take this side.”

“Sure,” JJ and Spencer answered almost in unison. They smiled at each other after realizing what happened. Then, they left together to walk across the clearing towards where Hotch wanted them to stay for the next hour while we would wait.

Hotch pointed to a fallen log hiding behind a patch of bushes. “Let’s go there.”

We strolled over around the bushes and sat on the log. I wiped off the dirt from the hem of my pants. While running through the forest, mud had collected there, which was less than ideal. And we had some time to spare with stupid things like that. Besides, it was nice to not think about the dead girl a few feet away from us.

“I’m sorry,” Hotch began hesitantly. I raised a brow, but continued picking at the mud. “About yesterday…” My brow fell. “I didn’t mean to snap.”

“It’s alright,” I responded, sitting upright. “You were right. I shouldn’t have asked about it and certainly not while we’re trying to focus on a case. It was out of line.”

We both knew that this job came first for us. We had worked too damn hard to get where we were in our careers, and even though we loved each other very much, we had to respect that our careers were just as important to us. When we first started dating, we made sure to be very clear with one another that the cases come first, not our relationship. That might sound odd to others, but it was what worked for us. It was what made sense for us. It was how we made our relationship work.

“It wasn’t that.” Hotch took my hand and flipped my palm over in order to clean the dirt off my fingertips. I stared at his jawline as he stared at my hands. “Truth is, I’m scared to have that conversation right now. Ever since Haley left, I haven’t been so confident about the idea of raising a family. I hardly ever get to see Jack as it is. I couldn’t imagine having another kid and not being able to see them just as often.”

“Aaron... You don’t have to be afraid of having a family. The right person should just… _get it_. Your job is important to you, but, of course, you’re going to make the time you have with your family special. You do it with Jack every time you have custody of him. I don’t think for a second that Jack hates you for doing your job. In fact, I think he admires you.”

“Yeah, but we’re both gone all the time. When would we ever make time for a kid—”

“There’s someone coming,” Sheridan whispered from the trees nearby.

Hotch and I pushed ourselves off the log we were sitting on and turned towards the clearing. The Unsub had come from the direction of the hiking trail. And he approached Meredith’s body with intent, not like a civilian who had just happened upon the pile of leaves and was curious to see what was underneath. This had to be our guy.

As the Unsub crouched and reached out to brush away the leaves, we made our move. JJ and Spencer jumped out of the treeline to the north with their guns raised, while Hotch, Sheridan, and I jumped out from the south. Once we revealed ourselves, the other cops came forward from their hiding spots, too.

“FBI! Put your hands on your head and step away from the body!” Hotch shouted.

The man hunched over the body immediately put his hands behind his head and stumbled back from the body. JJ holstered her weapon, pulled out her handcuffs, and grabbed the guy. She pushed him against the tree and turned him around to get a good look at the bastard's face. We all expected her to cuff the guy then and there, and we would call it a day, but she hesitated.

“Meyers?” she questioned. We all looked around to each other for answers, but none of us had any except for JJ. “This is the reporter who has been talking to the Hollow Man,” she told us. “You’re the Mill Creek Killer?”

“What? No!” he exclaimed defensively.

“Then how the hell did you find this place?” I asked.

“I got another letter from the Hollow Man. He told me that the Mill Creek Killer had struck again and where to go for the scoop. I showed up here thinking that I was going to meet the guy, get an exclusive or something.”

JJ’s grip on Meyers fell and she took a step back. “How did he tell you this?”

“He sent me a letter. Here, take a look at it yourself.” Meyers pulled out a piece of paper from his back pocket, and while shaking harder than a chihuahua, handed it to JJ. “I swear, I didn’t do this.”

JJ looked over the letter as the sound of a helicopter flying overhead buzzed through the trees. We all looked up to see a news helicopter hovering over the crime scene. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. That was our one chance of catching the Mill Creek Killer, and the Hollow Man ruined it. Fuck.

Hotch grabbed my arm and turned me around so that we could talk privately for a moment. “We can arrest him for interfering in a police investigation, question him back at the precinct, but I don’t know how much help it’ll be.”

“If you thought we were rushing before…” I began, thinking long and hard about what was going to happen next with the Mill Creek Killer. With the news hovering overhead, he was surely going to see it and we wouldn’t be able to set up another sting. “He didn’t finish the ritual. He was already in a hurry to find a new victim because we were close to finding him, but now that he hasn’t completed the one thing that gives him relief, he’ll be desperate for another. He won’t wait anymore than a day. We _have_ to find this guy now.”

“I just don’t get it. If these guys are friends of some sort, why would the Hollow Man lead the press to the Mill Creek Killer’s crime scene?”

I considered his question. Like Hotch said, if they were friends, they wouldn’t have betrayed the other like this. Even if they were a master and apprentice duo, too, it wouldn’t unfold like this. If the Hollow Man wanted the Mill Creek Killer to be caught, he would have contacted us directly. But he didn’t. He wanted the media to connect him to the Mill Creek Killer’s cases. By doing so, he has injected himself into another part of the situation. He wasn’t getting the attention he wanted for killing those prostitutes, so he resorted to diverting the attention on the Mill Creek Killer to himself.

“They’re not friends. They’re competitors. They both want the media attention, but neither of them want to turn in the other because they are fascinated by the other murders. The Mill Creek Killer has to know that the Hollow Man did this to take his attention away. So not only was the ritual ruined, but the media high afterwards. That means he’s not going to be thinking when it comes to his next victim. He doesn’t care about being careful now. He only cares about the attention.”

“He’s going to start taking them off the streets.”

“Or from their homes, their jobs, restaurants. Anywhere.”

“Hotch,” Spencer said, nearing us, “I just got a call from the precinct. A woman called 911, said that a guy just tried to kidnap her off the street.”

“So we were right,” I told Hotch.

He scratched his temple. “Alright, Reid, we’ll drop you and JJ off at the precinct. Sort out this Hollow Man mess while we go to interview the woman to see if it’s connected.”

* * *

A crowd had gathered around the caution tape surrounding the scene. Cops were standing around in the middle of the street, trying to redirect traffic and deal with the worried bystanders. One cop, specifically, was standing at the border of the scene, likely under orders to only let us in since they were waiting for us to show up and question the victim. When Hotch and I showed our badges, the cop smiled lightly and lifted the tape up for us. We ducked ever so slightly under before heading over to where the victim was standing with two officers.

We flashed our badges again to the woman and dismissed the officers so that we could talk to her alone. She had obviously been through this process of questioning a few times already, so she was already keen to tell her story again before we could even ask her to. A sign that she was still anxious about what had just transpired— and rightfully so, too.

She began to give us a detailed account of the man who approached her, what he said to her, and then how he tried to take her. Just as we had profiled him to appear, she explained that he was very handsome— which was why she had stopped to talk to him in the first place. He had approached her and asked if she had a phone that he could borrow since his car wasn’t starting and his phone was dead. When she couldn’t find her phone and he offered her the chance to come look at the car with him, that was when she declined; and when she did, he tried to forcefully take her.

“I’d been watching the news, and saw that they were looking for a guy who has been taking women during the day. I didn’t know what to do besides scream.”

We thanked her for telling us what happened, then Hotch asked if she would be willing to sit with a sketch artist in order to give us a visual of what her attacker looked like. She was more than happy to do so, and we immediately sent her along with another officer who would take her to the precinct to meet with the artist.

As we headed back to the car, Hotch got a call from Gideon. I leaned against the side of the car while he answered. From Hotch’s side of the call, I was beginning to get the gist of what was going on. Spencer, Gideon, and Morgan had finally found the way that the Hollow Man and the Mill Creek Killer were saying connected: the classifieds in the newspaper. That was how the Hollow Man was able to tell Jim Meyers where Meredith Dale’s body was.

I pushed myself off of the car and turned to Hotch. He raised a brow while still on the phone, letting me know that he was aware I had something important to say. If they were communicating via the classifieds, then that was how we were going to lure the Mill Creek Killer into our next sting operation.

It was getting late in the day, we would likely only have another hour or so to put another message into the classifieds for the morning paper. And Spencer was perhaps the only one who knew their speech patterns well enough to write a convincing coded message. But it was our only shot— it was our _last_ shot, really.

So I told Hotch the plan I had pieced together in my head over the last few seconds, and he relayed the information to Spencer and the team over the phone. Spencer would have to write a message to the Mill Creek Killer from the Hollow Man, telling him that he was sorry for ruining his plans with Meredith Dale, so he wanted to make it up to him by giving him the gift of another victim. The location would be hidden in the message, and in the morning, we would take an agent out there who matched the descriptions of his usual victims to play dead in order to lure him in. Since he was desperate to complete the ritual, he was sure to come. I had no doubts. He wouldn’t be thinking straight, so he would fall for the trap easily. But we had to hurry.

Hotch hung up the phone with the team so that they could start working on the message. We headed back to the precinct and managed to catch the tail end of them working on it. By that point, though, Spencer was rushing as the deadline was only twenty or so minutes away. Meanwhile, JJ was talking to Meyers about controlling the Hollow Man in the media for the next day or so to keep him distracted from the Mill Creek Killer sting, and Detective Sheridan was asking around for a female detective that was willing to sit in as our cadaver for the sting. Most of the women were understandably not too keen on the idea, but there were two girls who offered and were brought to me and Hotch for consideration.

We walked them both through the plan and what the Mill Creek Killer would likely do— but it would be in a controlled space and we wouldn’t let him get too far. We just couldn’t afford to have another mess up like with Meyers. We needed to make sure we got the right guy this time. And by the time we ran through it all with both of the women, one decided they weren’t brave enough to take on the task anymore, but the other didn’t budge and insisted that she was ready.

Everyone slept at the office that night. There was no reason to go to the hotel when there was still so much work left to be done. I hadn’t even intended to fall asleep at all. Morgan and Gideon were discussing their case with us since they were struggling to connect more clues with the Hollow Man. The last thing I remembered before falling asleep at the table was looking at the pictures from the most recent crime scene. The Hollow Man had killed a sixteen year old girl prostitute behind a dumpster and her friend was the one to find her. And there were still no leads.

When Hotch woke me up in the morning, I was laying down on the couch in the break room, which had practically been turned into a second board room for our team to work in. I figured that Hotch must have moved me at some point, because he was sitting in a chair that he placed right beside me, reading through another file while tracing light figure eights on my shoulder.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” he smiled at me as I sat up.

I stretched and yawned away my exhaustion. “What time is it?”

“8:30. We’re leaving in about thirty minutes.”

“Did you guys make any progress with the Hollow Man?”

He shook his head and I shrugged disappointedly. It wasn’t a shock, but it was still upsetting that we weren’t any closer. Granted, if we were going to catch the Mill Creek Killer later, he was sure to give up his competitor after some interrogation, so maybe it didn’t really matter in the end what they did or didn’t find while I was asleep.

I stood up and stretched again for extra measure, acutely aware that Hotch was staring at me out of the corner of his eye. After a moment of waking myself up, I strolled over to the coffee pot and poured myself a cup before offering Hotch one, too. He accepted the offer and I poured another cup full, then walked back over to the couch. I handed him his drink as I sat down. I leaned forward and propped both of my elbows up on his knee closest to me and kept the warm rim of the cup pressed against my lips so that I could smell the coffee while also warming up my nose from the steam.

“What are you looking at?”

“We got the sketch back from yesterday’s victim,” he answered, holding the drawing up for me to see.

He was almost exactly how I imagined him. He was _definitely_ attractive, if you could get past the fact that he was a total sociopath. His face was square. His eyes were light, bright, and wide. His lips were perk, perfect for kissing— which was always an unconscious factor people tended to put into consideration when it came to potential partners. And most noticeable about his appearance was his hair. He was clean shaven, and his hair was short and nicely cut. He didn’t match any physical features one would expect from a textbook sociopath. But that was definitely a reason why we hadn’t found him yet and why these women were so interested in going with him somewhere private. He didn’t look at all scary. That was what made him dangerous.

“Well, at least we’ll know if we get the right guy this time,” I laughed.

Hotch chuckled slightly but bit it back when he realized that he had let it escape him. My smile faded and I stared at his cheek for a second before feeling the urge to look at his eyes again. I let go of the coffee cup with one hand and went to hold his face in my palm. His skin was so cold compared to my warm hand, and he noticed it, too, right away. I dragged my thumb down his jawline, applying slight pressure towards his chin to make him look at me. He leaned into my touch, his eyes falling shut as he relaxed.

“We’re going to get this guy,” I reassured him. “And then we get to go home and see Jack.” He smiled at the thought. “We’re going to be okay.”

He opened his eyes and leaned towards me before kissing me. “We’re going to be okay,” he whispered against my lips. I kissed him again eagerly.

The door to the break room opened. Hotch and I immediately pulled away and looked over. “Hotch, Y/N—” JJ had come in hurriedly, but was slowly realizing that she had interrupted and regretted not knocking. “Sorry… Uh. We’re getting ready to head out. You guys should gear up.”

“Thanks, JJ,” I said. She smiled politely and backed out of the room much faster than she had come in. I started laughing once the door closed behind her. Hotch looked me up and down and started laughing, too. “Well…” I shrugged before kissing him again.

At the sting operation site, a makeup artist sat with the detective who was going to lay down as the body so as to make her look convingly dead. While JJ and Spencer were covering her body in leaves, Hotch and I reviewed the plan with her one more time. It was very possible that the Mill Creek Killer would come up to her and touch her, but we wouldn’t let him get much further than that. She just _had_ to stay still until we decided to reveal ourselves. She would be okay, we promised that much.

When she was ready, we helped her lay down without rustling any of the leaves, then covered her face. Afterwards, when she looked as the other victims had, we all retreated into the forest to hide until the Mill Creek Killer would show up. I checked my watch to see that we had only five minutes until he was supposed to show up— at least according to the note we put in the classifieds. He could possibly have been too scared to show up on time, so we had to expect that he could perhaps show up late.

Hotch and I didn’t sit down or talk this time around. The stakes were too high to think about anything other than catching this asshole once and for all. I wouldn’t let him get away again. I couldn’t. And I was sure that the rest of the team felt the same way. In fact, I knew it. JJ looked as nervous as I did, Hotch’s silence told me that he was focusing on not jumping out too soon, and Spencer was searching the treeline frantically for any sign of movement.

Nearly five more minutes after the Unsub was supposed to arrive, we heard rustling in the forest coming from across where we stood. As a man walked into the clearing, he kept his head low, focusing only on the girl covered by leaves laying before him. He chuckled to himself and giddy approached the detective. He crouched down, tore off his jacket, and pulled out a tube of lipstick from one of the pockets. 

Once we saw the lipstick, we knew we finally had the Mill Creek Killer. The lipstick was his signature. He wouldn’t complete the ritual without it.

“Go,” I ordered quietly. Simultaneously, we all jumped out of the bushes and into the clearing with our weapons raised. Hotch ran at the Unsub and tackled him before he could put a finger on the detective. She sat up, her weapon pointed at him as Hotch put his knee on the Mill Creek Killer’s lower back and started handcuffing him. I turned to the detective, “You alright?” She nodded. “Good.” I held out a hand, she took it, then I pulled her up to her feet.

We did it. We won. We got the son of a bitch.


	10. THE MILL CREEK KILLER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Descriptions of murder and kidnapping. Being held hostage at gunpoint. All around mature content!
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 09. Right after part nine.

Hotch dragged the Unsub back to the car while JJ, Spencer, and I followed. We were going to head down to the precinct to question and process him while the local police bagged the Unsub’s personal belongings for evidence. When we got to the car, I grabbed an unmarked bulletproof vest and started wrapping it around the Mill Creek Killer’s torso. Hotch held him to make sure he wouldn’t run or try anything, and I tried to keep my eyes down so as to not give him the satisfaction of giving him my attention. That was until he leaned forward ever so slightly and smelled my hair. I flinched back and Hotch pulled the guy away before shoving him in the car and slamming the door shut on his face.

“You ride up front with me,” he insisted.

“I’m not putting Spencer back there with him.”

“And I’m clearly not putting you back there with him. So either you sit up front or you ride in another car. Your choice.”

“Hotch, he’s not even—”

“No.”

I rolled my eyes and pulled the front passenger’s car door open. JJ and Spencer, who had been watching us argue, gave each other a look that said: “What the _fuck_?” And got into the back of the car with the Mill Creek Killer.

The whole drive to the station, the Unsub was quiet. I looked at him occasionally through the side mirror just outside my window, and every time I did, he was smiling at me. Suddenly I got why all of his victims always went with him willingly. His smile was very inviting, and if I didn’t know what I did, I would have found his smile attractive— and I certainly would’ve gone with him anywhere, too. But I knew what kind of monster he was, and, therefore, I didn’t see the appeal. His smile only ran a chill up my spine every time I caught it.

At the precinct, just as JJ had set up, the media was waiting outside for us. Live cameras were recording us pulling up, photographers were taking pictures, and reporters were waiting to yell out their questions. It was all apart of the plan, but we had to play ignorant to it so as to boost the Unsub’s ego. He wanted the attention, and we were giving it to him. Likewise, the Hollow Man wanted the attention, but he wasn’t getting it. It was only phase one of us attempting to coax him out of hiding.

I got out of the car after JJ and Spencer. JJ stepped out of the way for me so I could grab the Mill Creek Killer as he scooted out of the car, too. As he was revealed, the news started going crazy. Lights were flashing in our eyes, cameras were following our every movements, and everyone was shouting at us at the same time. Hotch and JJ held the crowd back as Spencer and I escorted the Unsub inside.

When we were inside, I led him to the boardroom while the others went to regroup with Gideon and Morgan. The next phase of the plan was to begin, and they needed to make sure that JJ was ready. If we were going to catch the Hollow Man now, it was all up to phase two going off without a hitch. But that meant we all had to do our part— not just JJ. There was still a lot to be done, including getting the Mill Creek Killer to confess. As of when we caught him, all we had was probably cause. We still technically didn’t have any physical evidence connecting him to the crime, which meant that he would either have to fess up, or in 72 hours, we would have to release him.

I peeled off the bulletproof vest from his chest. “Sit down for me,” I instructed him calmly. He did as I asked and I folded the bulletproof vest under my arm. “Wait here for a moment.”

Just outside the boardroom, I found the team discussing who was going to talk to him. Truth be told, when we created the plan, we thought we would have more evidence by this point, but now that we didn’t, someone had to go in there and mess with him until he budged. Gideon or Hotch were the likely choices because they had been profiling far longer than the rest of us, but there was something the team had failed to recognize until I approached.

I was the Mill Creek Killer’s type.

Ever since he saw me, he couldn’t stop staring and smiling at me like he was thinking off all of the ways he’d torture and murder me. It made sense, too. Physically, I matched the descriptions of his past victims. My dark hair, my physique, my eyes, my skin color, and so on. Not to mention, his MO beyond physical traits was to hunt after women who were successful, educated, and had families to go home to. Technically, I was at least two of the three requirements, but all three could be feigned in order to trick him into believing that I was exactly his type.

“Think about it,” I begged, “he’s not going to talk to you guys because he’s been dealing with guys like you all his life. That’s how he ended up like this, right? But who is he more likely to trip up for? The one person here who looks like his victims.”

“No,” Hotch said, shaking his head vigorously. “Gideon can handle this.”

I scoffed, “I’m not wrong, Hotch. You’ve gotta trust me on this one.”

But he was still adamant on his answer. “You don’t need to give him the satisfaction. Maybe Gideon can falsely promise time alone with you to get information out of him.”

“That won’t work, and you know it.”

“They’re right,” Gideon interrupted our little argument. “They should be the one to do it. This guy knows what he’s doing. He’s probably talked to cops before, or at the very least knows how to lie and weasel his way out of trouble. But if he’s caught off guard by the one thing he desires, he might open up.”

Hotch considered, his eyes glued to the floor. I was right. Gideon knew it, the team knew it, and Hotch knew it; but he didn’t want to admit it. He was being protective, but he had to let me do my job. That was the whole point of our rules, right? Our feelings shouldn’t interfere with what needs to be done. So I just needed him to trust me this once.

“Fine,” he finally budged. “But you’re going to wear a live wire so that we can get his confession on tape.” I nodded an agreement. “And if at any point he says or does anything wrong, I’m ending the interrogation and Gideon will pick it up from there. Got it?” Honestly, it was better than I was expecting, so I took it. “You don’t go anywhere near him, and you don’t antagonize him, because if you do, he won’t hesitate to attack you.”

“He’s on edge,” Gideon explained, “use that to your advantage. His mind is telling him that he needs to complete the ritual, and it’s going to be telling him that he needs to do it with you. So get the answers, but don’t give him any reason to resort to violence.”

“I’ve got this, guys. You worry too much,” I laughed. We started heading over to one of the desks so that Reid could start attaching a wire to me for the interrogation. As I sat in front of him, the team watched nervously.

“We know that he’s self centered because of his need for attention, but he’s also not going to flat out admit what he did. You need to _tell_ him what he did. If he denies it, act like you didn’t hear it. You know that he did this, you need to make sure he knows that, and you need to get him to just admit it of his own free will.”

“I’ve got it,” I insisted. Reid finished putting the wire on me at that moment. I readjusted my shirt over the wire to hide it a bit better and looked at Hotch. “Kiss me,” I told him.

He looked instantly bewildered at my comment, hesitating while thinking about what the hell could have possibly possessed me to say such a thing. “ _What_?”

“This guy’s type is successful, educated, and family oriented women— JJ, give me your ring real quick,” I ordered quickly. She looked at the silver ring on her finger that her mother had given to her as a graduation present years ago. But she gave it to me warily, anyhow, wanting to see where I was going with this. I took the ring and slid it onto my wedding finger, then I held up the back of my palm in front of Hotch, “See? Now we’re married.” I dropped my hand and started unbuttoning some of my shirt. “This guy clearly knows that I’m educated, successful, and powerful if I’m working for the FBI and you guys trust me enough to let me go in there alone. Now, all the proof he needs of me being a worthy victim is that I have a family to go home to. With the ring on my finger, it proves that I’m married— or at least pretending to be, but he shouldn’t know that. But the catch is that he needs to know that I have someone I love, someone who’s waiting for me to come home. So, come here, hot stuff,” I said, pulling at his tie.

Hotch quickly looked around, acutely aware that everyone was watching, before he turned back to kiss me. We had to make it really believable. No holding back just because our coworkers were watching. He knew this just as well as I did, so his hands instinctively cupped my cheeks and held me so that he could kiss me deeper and his tongue could work its way into my mouth to claim domination.

After we both ran out of breath, we barely parted and looked at each other. Hotch’s pupils were dilated again and he was biting his lips like he was trying to not kiss me again. I looked to Gideon before Hotch could be tempted. “Did it work?

“Well, he’s certainly watching,” Gideon chuckled, shocked and impressed by our little show.

“So is everyone else,” JJ scoffed.

My fingers combed the end of Hotch’s hair that laid against his neck. “Don’t worry about me like that again,” I whispered and winked. He was speechless as I stood up and started walking towards the glass walled boardroom. With my hand on the door handle, I took in a deep breath and prepared myself for what was going to come next. “Good afternoon,” I welcomed with a faux smile, stepping into the room.

“Good afternoon,” he answered, smiling politely and innocently back at me.

“I’m Agent Greenaway with the FBI. I’m here to talk with you about the women you murdered. Are you comfortable?” I closed the door behind me and took a few more steps into the room.

He chuckled and looked at his wrists. “As comfortable as I can be with handcuffs on.” He spoke so eloquently, in such a sophisticated manner that would trick anyone else into thinking that he was an innocent and sincere man.

I nodded knowingly, “I understand.”

I took a few more steps forward while digging into my pocket for the key to his handcuffs. I had picked them off of Hotch when he was practically leaning over me while kissing me. I figured that the Unsub would try this tactic of feigning innocence, and he would do so by insisting that the handcuffs come off. I wanted to build a bridge with him, so I decided to take them off for him.

“Better?” 

“Tons. Thank you.”

“No problem.” I took the seat next to him. Truth be told, I was surprised that Hotch hadn’t already burst into the room. Not only had I _already_ approached the Unsub, but I also unhandcuffed him, and sat next to him. I wasn’t exactly following any of the rules Hotch gave me for this interrogation. “I introduced myself to you, are you not going to tell me your name?” He shrugged. “You know, while working with the FBI, I haven’t come across a single case like yours. We don’t know your name, where you’re from, or who you were before this, but what we do know is that you enjoy killing women to fulfill your own sexual fantasies. It’s so fascinating to me that I can know that about you, but not your name.”

His smile widened. “I’m sorry, Agent Greenaway, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about…” His eyes began to wander down my body and he licked his lips. “I asked your husband out there when he falsely arrested me what I did, and he refused to tell me. But now you’re accusing me of murder. I’m quite flabbergasted, I must admit.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are. Not because you were ‘ _falsely arrested_ ’, but because we caught you.”

“I hadn’t done anything but happen upon a woman in the forest who seemed distressed, so I hurried over to help here when I was suddenly tackled and shackled. That makes me a hero, doesn’t it, Agent Greenaway?”

“No. It doesn’t. Really, I couldn’t even believe we caught you. I had money on the Mill Creek Killer cases going cold.”

“You think I had something to do with that?”

“I know you did. It’s a shame, though. I bet $20 that we would catch the Hollow Man before you. But here we are, and he’s still out there… and it’s very likely that we’ll never find him.” I tsked my tongue, “I really thought it would be harder to get you.”

He suddenly froze and bit the inside of his cheek. Where there was once a bright, handsome smile, there was now a dark, jealous scowl. That was the first breakthrough. I could use that.

“Why does that upset you?” I questioned him. “I thought that the two of you are friends. I mean, who else communicates through the classifieds in the newspaper besides friends?”

“I don’t know the Hollow Man,” he insisted, then paused to choose his next words very carefully. He was trying to dance around admitting anything while still trying to find a way to discredit the Hollow Man. “From what I’ve read and seen in the news, though, I’d say he’s more like an obsessed fan.”

“So you see yourself as some kind of celebrity.”

He smiled at my obvious attempt to trap him, but worked right around it with: “ I don’t think that the Mill Creek Killer is a celebrity, no. I’d say he’s more of an… _artist_ ,” he said, leaning in towards me.

I didn’t move away from him like I was sure he expected of me. I held my ground and played along. “I see. So, then, the Hollow Man is also an aspiring artist, like yourself.”

I wasn’t giving up on the advice Gideon gave me. This guy needed to know that I wasn’t going to let him get away or even play dumb with him. He was caught and the only way he was leaving that room was in chains. So I just had to keep pressing his buttons until something would eventually tick a nerve and get under his skin enough.

“But, you see, what I don’t get about that is how much smarter he has proven to be compared to you. He was the one who found Meredith Dale’s body before us and gave her to us and the press. That wasn’t just pure, dumb luck. He’s clearly more experienced than you if he could double cross you like that. So, now, because he’s the better one of the two of you, he’ll be the one all over the news, and you’ll be pushed aside. Again, I was hoping that it would be him here sitting with me, not you. Maybe the conversation would be more interesting. At least I’d have something of substance to tell the media. Imagine the headlines: The Hollow Man admits to killing over ten women!”

He licked his teeth, sucked in a deep breath, and let out a heavy sigh. His nails were digging into the armrests of his chair. He was holding himself back. Good. That meant that I was close. And there was only one last thing I hadn’t yet brought up with him, but I was sure that it would be the final nail in the coffin.

The Unsub’s confidence wasn’t a mask of any kind like we had originally profiled. As I was interrogating him, I realized that he truly believed what he was saying about the Hollow Man and the Mill Creek Killer— besides denying the fact that he was apart of it. He believed himself, which tricked others into believing him, too. But not me. I knew that if I were to not only threaten the erasure of his violence from history, but also discredit him entirely, he would break. And in order to discredit him, I needed to bring up the one aspect of the crime that he was ashamed of: visiting and defiling the bodies afterwards.

Leaving them and presenting them for us to find was indeed an art, but going back to them was supposed to be his little secret. That was why he always made sure that the bodies had decomposed by the time we would find them. He didn’t want there to be any trace of what he did afterwards. But he got sloppy towards the end, and that was how we caught him.

“I just want to ask you one more thing before we throw you in prison and you become nothing more than a distant memory.” I leaned forward to make sure he was looking at anything other than my eyes. “Would you have killed me and your way with me the same way you did with the other victims?”

He shifted in his chair slightly as his breath shallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on. You would have enjoyed it, wouldn’t you? Kidnapping me, strangling me, covering my body with leaves to protect me, applying lipstick to my lips, brushing my hair back to make me all pretty for you. You would have liked it. I know it. Imagine if I told people that. What would they think of you?”

By bringing up the fact that I would expose his secret about him abusing the bodies afterwards, I had shocked his nerves. While he was already on edge, I had just pressed the one button that I shouldn’t have gone for.

“Shut up…” he whispered under his breath. “Stop it.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t tell anyone about that.”

“What? That you went back to the bodies? Why not? I’ll scream it from the rooftops if I want. You say that it’s not you, right? So what the fuck do you care? Honestly, you probably killed and violated more women than just the ones we found. And you would do the same thing, given the chance. So I’ll say whatever I want about you!”

His palm slapped the table and he leaned forward, “You can’t tell anyone that I went back!”

“So you want me to lie and just say that you killed them and left them alone?!”

“Yes! I killed them! I killed them, but you can’t tell anyone about the lipstick!” He fell silent. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned back as he realized that he had finally been caught. “That prick doesn’t deserve to be more famous. _I’m_ the artist. _I’m_ the one who matters most.”

He knew that he was done for. He was going to prison, there was no doubt now. But he wasn’t going to go down alone. He was going to take the Hollow Man with him to make sure that the Hollow Man cases didn’t run cold and become more infamous. Their popularity contest was still going, even with him in custody and his friend roaming the streets. He couldn’t have that.

“I’ll tell you everything…” he admitted, giving up the facade he had originally put on for us. “But I want you to ask you a question first, Agent Greenaway.” I leaned back in my seat, too, and gestured for him to ask away, because what could he possibly ask me that would be of any consequence? “Do you have any children?”

“Why do you care?”

“That man you were kissing outside, before you came in here. He’s your husband, isn’t he?” I looked out to the break room across the way and spotted the team sitting around a computer, definitely listening to our conversation. “I noticed the wedding ring on your hand almost immediately. And people only kiss like _that_ when they truly love one another, and when that happens… well, usually, people in love tend to have kids. That being said, I know that in your line of work, it’s increasingly hard to raise a family when both parties of the couple are special agents. So I ask again, do you have any kids, Agent Greenaway?”

I tore my eyes away from the team and looked the Mill Creek Killer in the eyes. “No. I don’t have any kids.” And, for some reason, I felt my heart wrench as I said it. All this time, as I was trying to get under his skin, he had managed to find the one thing that bothered me. He tsked his tongue and sighed to himself. “What is it?” I questioned curiously.

“Despite that, Agent Greenaway, I would have still killed you if I were given the chance. It just wouldn’t have felt as good because you don’t have any little Greenaways running around at home.”

The door suddenly flew open and Hotch stormed in. The Mill Creek Killer smirked, realizing that not only had he pushed my buttons back, but he got to Hotch, too. I began insisting that Hotch let me finish the interrogation, but he didn’t listen as he grabbed my arm and started pulling me out of the boardroom. Gideon traded places with me once I was out the door.

Hotch dragged me to the break room 

“What the fuck are you _doing_?” I hissed. “I had him!”

“And he had you.”

“He was going to tell me everything!”

“I told you that I would pull you out of there if you broke any of the rules. You broke _three_ of them, Y/N.”

“But I _had_ him, Hotch! We could have the Hollow Man right now if you would have just waited a few more minutes!”

Morgan, JJ, and Reid all slid out of the room to give us privacy. I wiped my hands over my face and sighed. The question that had been eating me alive since Hotch got upset over the topic of having kids was starting to boil over in my heart. I needed answers from him.

“Haley was the one who wanted Jack, wasn’t she?”

“What do you mean?”

“She said she wanted a kid first. She was lonely… You were always gone for days to weeks on end on assignments, and she was left all alone in that house. She wanted someone to keep her company, so she told you she wanted a baby. Am I wrong?” Hotch didn’t answer and my heart sank. “You said ‘we’ yesterday. You said that _we’re_ always gone, and asked when there would be time for _us_ to have a kid. Maybe the Unsub’s right. It doesn’t make sense for us. Our jobs are our lives… We don’t know how to raise a family. Like you said, it’s already hard enough to spend time with Jack—”

“Y/N—”

“Do you think I’m wrong?”

Hotch paused for a short moment before answering, “No.”

I stared at him. He wasn’t even trying. And I didn’t even understand why I cared. I always knew that the traditional family dynamic wasn’t in my future. I knew that the whole “find a guy, settle down, get a big house, have a few kids, and live happily ever after” bullshit cliche wasn’t meant for me. And, yet… it irked me that Hotch and I were finally giving up on the idea.

This was what he was scared of. The big argument where our feelings would get hurt and we would be upset with each other. This was exactly why he didn’t want to talk about it, especially during a case when we couldn’t sit down and just talk about it privately like adults would.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Gideon apologized, poking his head into the room, “but the press conference is about to start. Y/N should be up there with me and JJ.”

I looked away from Hotch and stared at the floor as I wiped away a tear from my cheek. I nodded my answer to Gideon and turned with a smile. We left together, but Hotch stayed to take another moment to himself in the break room to think over what just happened.

The press was already there, pushing against each other for the best spot to see the front. By the time I stood where and how JJ wanted, I got a good look at the room, Hotch stood in the back of the room with Morgan and Reid, while JJ, Gideon, and I stood up front. JJ was at the podium, reviewing her notes one last time before getting started, and Gideon and I were on either side of her, staring straight at the cameras. JJ tapped the microphone in front of her lightly to catch everyone’s attention. When the room fell silent, she fixed her posture, smiled, and began with the script we prepared as part of phase three.

“We are proud to announce that the Mill Creek Killer has been apprehended by our absolute finest. Earlier today, the Bureau conducted a sting operation, which resulted in the arrest of one male suspect, who has since confessed to his crimes. This man is very sophisticated, very charismatic, very smart— just as we had warned the public. The Mill Creek Killer will continue to stay in the BAU’s custody as we continue to interview and study his incredibly complex case and behaviors. This is by far the most elaborate and impressive case we have seen in years. Questions?” She looked up and pointed into the crowd. “Yes?”

“What is the FBI doing about the other serial killer?” a man to the left asked.

“The FBI is no longer involved with that case. After some new information was unveiled, we realized that the shootings are not related.” She pointed to another reporter, “Go ahead.”

“What’s the new information?” a woman down the middle inquired.

“We believe that they’re isolated incidents in relation to different robberies gone wrong. The last two shootings, however, seem to be copycats.” She pointed next to Jim Meyers.

“So, then, there is no Hollow Man?” Meyers asked from the right.

“We believe that the man claiming responsibility for such incidents is nothing more than a common criminal. This is no longer a BAU case, as it lacks certain sophistications, class, and elegants. It’s nothing that the BAU needs to concern themselves when the local PD is capable of handling it themselves from here on out. That’s all the questions we have time for today. Thank you all for coming.”

Gideon stepped back and swung his arm out and around the empty space in front of him as a kind gesture of giving JJ room to move past him. After she walked by, Gideon followed, and I hurried after. Hotch, Morgan, and Reid all moved from the back of the room, through the crowd, and met up with us in the break room. Morgan closed the door behind all of us.

Gideon sighed and sat on the couch, “We’ve set the bait. Now we just have to see if he’ll bite.”

Everyone sat down, knowing that we were playing yet another waiting game with this guy. Neither Hotch nor I sat, though. We were the only ones, and we were standing on opposite sides of the team. He looked over at me and started to take a step towards me, but I shook my head and grabbed the door handle. He stopped himself and watched me leave the break room, walk through the office, and enter the lobby.

When I stepped into the lobby, I suddenly felt like I could breathe. I had been trapped in the boardroom, the break room, and the office for so long that I felt like I was choking on the air in there. But out in the lobby, with the sandstone marble colors and cold floors, it felt like a whole other building, really. Even though the two officers were still guarding the checkpoint, and civilians were rushing around to get in or out of the precinct, it felt free. I felt free for a few moments. And I felt like I could finally mull over what happened with Hotch.

He had fucked up. There was no denying it. I was close to getting more information from the Mill Creek Killer, but Hotch let his emotions get in the way and he stopped me from doing my job. The worst part of it all, though, was that he couldn’t be honest with me or himself. The fact that he pulled me out of the interrogation at that moment revealed to me that the topic of having kids with me was a trigger topic for him, too. That much I knew, of course. But his hesitancy to answer my questions, and the way he seemed more angry with the Mill Creek Killer for bringing it up rather than with me for making it a big deal, it told me that Hotch felt the same way I did. He wasn’t against the idea of having kids with me. It sounded nice, the thought of having something of our own, and being able to give Jack a little brother or sister.

But Hotch couldn’t fucking admit it because he was scared. Maybe it had to do with Haley, like he insinuated, or maybe it had to do with me. I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing: Aaron Hotchner wasn’t sure how to be a good father while also balancing his job. He tried his best with Jack, everyone knew it. But Hotch was too scared of himself and the consequences of messing up a child’s adolescence to even think about giving it another try.

That made me mad.

It was one thing if Hotch truly believed that he didn’t want more kids— or even if he knew that he didn’t want kids with _me_. However, the fact that he did want more kids, and likely with me, yet refused to say it aloud… It made my blood boil in a way I never expected.

I looked up from the floor, my trail of deep thoughts coming to an abrupt halt as the sound of the secuity’s metal detector made me jump. The officer standing at the detectors ordered the man who had just walked through to step to the side and stand with his arms and legs spread for a pat down. The man did as he was told and the officer began the mandatory and precautionary pat down.

Just as I thought about going back in to talk to Hotch as my mood improved considerably, the man kicked the officer in the face after he crouched down to check his legs. In a flash, the man grabbed the officer’s gun and demanded that he stay down. While pointing the gun at the officer on the floor, he told the other officer, the one sitting at the desk, to hand his over. The officer immediately obeyed, sliding his gun on the floor and to the man. The man reached down and grabbed the second gun, holding one at each officer’s face.

I moved for my gun, aiming at the suspect's head, but when he saw me, he pressed the barrel of one of the guns to the forehead of the officer on the ground. The man stared at me for a moment before snapping himself out of his trance and yelling, “Drop your weapon or I’ll brain his brains out!”

Realistically, I could have taken the shot, but the suspect was going to go down shooting. With the gun pressed to the officer’s temple, any movement on the trigger and he’d be dead in an instant. And there was no telling who he would end up shooting with the other gun flailing around. So I did the only thing I could. I released my grip and my gun and undid my shooting stance.

“Drop your gun and handcuff these officers together and to this pole.”

I did as he said, placing my gun carefully on the floor before standing back upright and grabbing my handcuffs. He kept the guns aimed at both officers as I approached slowly, my arms raised in surrender. He yelled at me to hurry up, and I did. I took one wrist of each officer and handcuffed them to the pole that I was directed to by the armed man.

When I was done, I took a step back with my hands raised in the air again. As I tried to get away from him slowly, he approached me faster and grabbed me. “Start walking. Don’t try anything.” I nodded and started walking in front of him, my hands behind my head. We walked to the door and he told me to open it with my keycard. And I did. “Walk,” he ordered, urging me forward by poking my back with his guns. We walked together into the office and he immediately grew hostile, “Where is he! I want to see him!”

Everyone turned, including the team, who was scattered about. Concomitantly, every officer in the precinct unholstered their weapons at the guy holding a gun to my head. Hotch moved around Morgan to get a better look at me and a better aim at the guy behind me. We looked at each other, and I only kept my eyes on him. He could get the shot, if he wanted to, but just like my opportunity back in the lobby, it was prevented by the fact that he’d shoot me first.

“He told you to say those things about me, didn’t he?” he asked JJ. “I saw you on TV,” he addressed me. “You were the one who caught him. He told you everything.”

I cringed slightly at the realization that the man holding a gun to my back at the moment was the Hollow Man. We wanted him to show himself, to act out, make some kind of mistake. But this wasn’t what we had in mind when we formed the plan. What kind of fucking idiot takes an FBI agent hostage in a police station? He had to know that he wasn’t getting out of there. That meant he didn’t care what happened to him. He didn’t care what would happen to me.

Shit.

Within an instant, Morgan tackled the Hollow Man from the side, and Hotch pulled me out of the way. There was no gunshot, and the Hollow Man accidentally dropped his gun. I stumbled into Hotch’s arms after failing to regain my balance when he yanked me towards him.

“You okay?” he asked. I nodded and hid my face in his chest as he wrapped his arms around me. “I’m sorry…”

“Me, too.”

* * *

Everyone fell asleep fairly quickly on the way home. Morgan, Reid, and JJ were the first to crash, but Gideon was a little more stubborn. He was nose deep in a book and didn’t give up for at least the first hour of the flight. Meanwhile, Hotch and I were sitting together in the back again, wide awake.

Last time we were on the plane, our attitudes were entirely different. His hands had been all over me, trying to prove a point about how I was dressed and how much of a brat I was. But this time around, his hands were all over me in a different way and for different reasons. There were no files to look over, nothing to keep us busy, nothing to keep his hands preoccupied. And after the day we had, he just wanted to know that I was _there_ and that I hadn’t given up on him yet.

My head was resting on his shoulder, our hands clasped together, our fingers intertwined. At one point, he even got so desperate for more of me, that he picked up my legs and draped them over his thighs. Though, for the first hour of the plane ride, while Gideon was still awake, neither of us said anything. We sat in silence, just appreciating that things hadn’t taken an ugly turn with the Hollow Man at the precinct. Then, when we heard Gideon snoring, I chuckled and hid my laugh in Hotch’s sleeve. He joined me in laughing for a moment.

When the hilarity of it passed, Hotch fell silent again before starting to trace circles on my thighs. “I’m sorry, Y/N. I know that you can handle yourself. I don’t doubt it… But… It’s fair of me to still worry because I love you, right?” I hummed an agreement. “And, really, if you want a family, then we could find a way to make it work.”

I squeezed his hand reassuringly and lovingly. “I know you mean well, but you have to let me do my job. I don’t think you understand how hard I work every day to prove myself worthy of being apart of this team, and the effort it takes to stay on Gideon’s good side. I need you to trust that I’ll do the right thing as an agent.”

We were silent for another moment. I didn’t know how to proceed to the next topic easily. More specifically, I didn’t know how to tell him that we weren’t ready, realistically. That having a family just wasn’t in the cards for us yet, at least. But I think that, somehow, my silence was answer enough for Hotch because he kissed the top of my head and hugged me tight like he was afraid to let go.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you, too.”


	11. THE SUPER BOWL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Name calling. Brat taming. Teasing/edging. Restraints (ties and handcuffs). Sub switching. Unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gents, and nonbinary sibs!). Impregnation kink.
> 
> Timeline: Season 2 Episode 14. A few days after part ten.

I didn’t even realize that I had fallen asleep that afternoon. We had a three day weekend thanks to Hotch and his love for the Super Bowl. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to even give us the time off, but the team needed it— and JJ was hosting a party at a bar downtown, _so_ we were, in a way, going to be team building. Team building while playing darts and pool, but you take the small wins where you can. And since Strauss didn’t oppose the extra day off, we all tucked tail and ran on Friday afternoon.

Hotch and I had been lounging around all day. Jack was at Haley’s house, which meant that we had the whole house to ourselves all day, and we could just go to JJ’s party without worrying about anything. In late afternoon, Hotch and I went upstairs to just read and relax on our bed, and I didn’t expect that I would end up falling asleep in his arms. In fact, I specifically remembered mentioning that I didn’t want to fall asleep. I just wanted to spend some time with him, doing nothing but being in each other’s company. There weren’t many chances we got for that between work and having custody of Jack whenever we weren’t on cases.

When I woke up, though, Hotch wasn’t in bed with me. He had tucked me under the covers and moved my book to the bedside table, but there was no Hotch. I sat slowly, trying to wake myself up a little faster than my body and mind were actually ready for. When everything caught up to my will, I threw the covers off and to the side, and went searching for Hotch.

The closet was on my side of the bed, just behind the wall it was pressed against. I peeked into the walk-in closet, but he wasn’t there. I tiptoed around the bed, dancing around the cold spots on the floor. The bathroom was just across from our bed. I knocked on the door and opened it to find Hotch at the mirror, brushing his hair back.

He looked at me through the reflection of the large wall mirror and smiled. “Morning, sleeping beauty.”

I pushed my hair out of my face and yawned, I leaned against the door frame and looked at his outfit. He was wearing a work suit, red tie and all. I chuckled. “You aren’t actually going to wear that to a Super Bowl party in a bar.”

Hotch looked down at himself and shrugged. “What?” I rolled my eyes. He put his hairbrush down. “I was about to wake you up, though, and see if you still want to go.”

“Only if you change into something more casual. Otherwise, if anyone asks, I’ve never met you.”

Hotch smirked and turned from the mirror to face me. “Fine.” He approached me and kissed my forehead as he tried to sneak past me on his way out of the bathroom.

I caught his hand and pulled gently to keep him from escaping. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he leaned in again to kiss my lips.

I perked up on my tiptoes so that I could wrap my arms around his neck. Hotch leaned down a little further as we kissed so that he could trap my body in his arms and pull me closer. The further we leaned into each other, the more aggressive his kiss got. He was suddenly fighting for dominance, and I let him.

“Jump,” he mumbled against my lips.

I did as I was told and jumped slightly so that he could lift me up. My legs wrapped around his torso as he started stumbling backwards towards the bed. When the back of his knees hit the bed frame, Hotch slowly sat down, still keeping me close to him, though. He never once let up his hold around me for fear that I would leave.

“Aaron,” I moaned, trying to urge him into making another move.

“Careful, baby girl,” he whispered.

“Why?” I fought back with a grin. “I have the upperhand.”

“Do you now? Choose your next words very carefully.”

I leaned in towards his ear, rolled my hips over his, and whispered, “Make me.”

Hotch suddenly grabbed my neck with one hand and my waist with the other, and flipped us so that I was laying on the bed and he was standing over me. I gulped. In hindsight, I should have seen this coming. I was playing with fire, and he trapped me on purpose in order to give him a reason to punish me. But I was beginning to immediately regret it.

I propped myself up on my elbows to watch as he slid off his jacket calmly, keeping eye contact with me the entire time. He folded it neatly and turned momentarily to set it down on the chair in the corner. When he returned to his spot in front of me, he stopped to stare at me and let the tension boil a little longer. There was a plan for me glowing in his eyes, but he was giving me a moment to think over every possibility of what he was going to do to me, and it was working. I even thought about trying to apologize, but I knew that wouldn’t work, it would only just amuse him.

“Move back,” he ordered, starting to undo his tie.

“Yes, Sir.” I gulped and did as I was told.

“Shirt off.”

“Yes, Sir.” I sat up long enough to tear off my shirt and toss it to the side, then laid back down. 

He yanked on one end of his tie and it slid off his neck quickly. While I expected him to calmly walk into the closet and put the tie away or even set it on the chair with his jacket, he did nothing of the sort. I silently cursed myself for riling him up as he ordered me to put my hands over my head, and I did so.

Hotch walked around to the side of the bed and sat beside me. Our glances made contact before he leaned over to kiss me. I closed my eyes and melted into the kiss. He wanted me to focus on him and not what he was about to do, and it worked. The soft silk touch of his tie hardly bothered me as he tied it around my wrists and through the poles of the headboard.

When I realized what he did, I parted from our kiss to look up at my hands and tried to pull them free. Hotch grinned wickedly when I could hardly move. “Too easy,” he chuckled, standing back up.

“Hotch—”

He turned and glared at me. “What did you just say, brat?”

“Sir—”

“No, no, no. What did you say?”

I rubbed my thighs together to stop thinking about how gruff his voice was and how demanding he sounded. He took notice and kept glaring at me. I really just wasn’t doing myself any favors. And when I didn’t answer, Hotch sat back down on the bed and put his hand around my neck.

“What _did_ you say, _whore_?”

My heart skipped a beat. He was really trying to get to me now. Not because he thought I would hate it, but because he knew that I loved it. The dominant voice, the orders, the tie, the names… his hand… Fuck. My head was already spinning and he hadn’t even touched me where I needed him most. I tugged instinctively at the restraints, and Hotch put a little more pressure around my neck.

“I’m sorry, Sir.”

“I didn’t ask for an apology. I asked you to tell me what you said.”

“I called you by your first name when I shouldn’t’ve.”

He licked his bottom lip. “And why did you do that?”

“Because I forgot my manners.”

“Good girl.” He released my neck and I took in a deep, relieved breath. 

After noticing how I was shifting my hips constantly and rubbing my thighs together for a while, Hotch decided to take a look for himself. His hand grabbed my left thigh and he pulled it away from the other one. I knew to keep them spread, because if I were to close them, I’d be in a hell of a lot more trouble than I was already in. I needed to pick my battles carefully.

Hotch’s finger’s drew a light line up my slit over my clothes and I gasped. His finger kept travelling up towards my waist band, then he slowly pulled at the drawstring of my sweatpants until the bow unraveled. He was being slow and meticulous on purpose. He wanted to see just how long he could go without giving me what I truly wanted.

When Hotch leisurely began to pull my sweats down, I bent my knees, planted my feet on the bed, and lifted my hips up to help him. When my pants were down far enough, he pushed my hips back down forcefully, then continued to slide them off. As they passed my ankles and the pants fell to the floor, Hotch kissed my hip bone over my panties.

“Sir, please,” I begged, tugging at his tie again.

“Shh…” he whispered against my skin.

A moan escaped my lips as his hand grabbed the inside to hold me open and his lips kissed my clit gently. It was as if he knew that I would want to react by closing my legs, because he caught me before I could and made sure that I stayed spread wide for him. He blew cold air over the wetness soaking my panties.

“Fuck.”

“Don’t make me gag you, too.”

My mouth snapped shut and I bit my lip. It took everything I had to not make a sound or move an inch as Hotch pulled my underwear down just as slowly as he had rid me of my pants. I screwed my eyes shut and bit my lip until I drew blood and cursed under my breath. He noticed, but he ignored it just that once because he was a little preoccupied with not pouncing on me the second my underwear was off.

His fingers traced another line up my slit, but this time daring to go a little deeper. For a fleeting moment, his fingers circled my clit and I thought that he was finally going to give me what I needed. But just as he gave me _something_ , he took it all away in an instant. I watched as he brought his fingers to his mouth and tasted me.

“You’re so wet already, and I’ve hardly touched you. Why is that?”

“Because I need your cock, Sir.”

“You don’t _need_ anything. You want to cum. But only good girls cum. And have you been good, whore?”

I nodded, “Yes, Sir.” That was an obvious lie. We both knew that I had behaved far from well. In fact, I had pretty much fucked everything up from step one. So. That was great for my odds, right? “Sir, please…” 

“I’m not done with you yet.” His fingers returned to my entrance and he pressed in gently and torturously slow. “Is this what you wanted?” I nodded. His fingers curled inside me. “You have a choice to make. You cum once now and I don’t touch you until next weekend..” He let the option linger in the air. If that was the good one, I was scared about what the other one could be. “Or you can wait until after the game.”

“Wait for what?”

“That’s a secret.”

I gulped. I weighed my options. On one hand, he was giving me the opportunity to cum, which I so desperately wanted to. On the other hand, he could just be rushing because at that point we were already going to be late for JJ’s party, so he would have more time later to do more. I felt like it was an obvious choice, but I didn’t like that he wouldn’t tell me anything about if I were to pick the second option. Still, it sounded better than not having him for an entire week.

“I’ll wait…” I said cautiously.

His grin widened and his fingers started thrusting in and out of me fast and hard. My back arched off the bed and I let out a loud moan that echoed throughout the house. I thought that by choosing the second option, he would immediately untie me and we would go to the party, but there he was, fucking me with his fingers like he was going to make me cum. I thrashed my hips around in euphoria, and he let me, which was odd. I didn’t even stop to consider the trap as my walls clenched around his two fingers and I was on the edge.

Hotch immediately pulled his fingers from my pussy and chuckled wickedly. I whined, pulling as hard as I could against his tie, and bucking my hips around to try to reach my orgasm, but to no avail. Hotch slapped my thigh and pushed me back down onto the bed.

“Asshole…” I muttered.

He caught me and slapped my other thigh. I tensed up and moaned. His fingers returned to my entrance and pressed back in. I bit back a moan, figuring that he stopped because I was making noise and moving around. I was trying to fix any mistakes I could have possibly made, but my brain was mush as three of his fingers fucked me with no remorse.

His fingers penetrated me all the way until the bottom knuckle and he started curling them against my g-spot. The fucker knew he was going to make me cum that way. All I could do was pray that I had behaved according to his standards and that he would let me cum, but as I approached my high for the second time, Hotch pulled his fingers out again.

I cried out and tried to force my body to orgasm just by grinding my hips around, but nothing worked. My high faded and I relaxed against the bed again. Hotch cleaned his fingers again by sucking on them seductively. I moaned at the sight, hoping that he would use them to fuck me again.

“I’m done with you for now,” he sighed, standing from the bed.

My eyes shot wide and I lifted my head off the bed as he walked back to the bathroom. “What?” I inquired, trying to release my hands again in a panic. Was he just going to leave me like that? Did he just figure that since we were already running late that there was no point in going? What happened to waiting for later? “Hotch!”

He returned, his hands washed and dry. He kept me tied up as he took his suit jacket back to the closet. I guessed that he at least took my advice and was going to change into something more comfortable. So did that mean we were still going? If so, why the fuck was I still tied up?

When he came back, he was wearing a brown quarter zip sweater and jeans. He looked so hot. Fuck. I wished to myself that I could have run my hands through his hair or grab his face long enough to kiss him passionately.

He stood at the end of the bed again and admired the mess he made of me. “I’ll untie you if you promise to not touch. Otherwise, I’ll just leave you like this and tell the team that you’re sick.”

“You’re fucking joking. That’s not fair, Hotch.”

“You were the one who made the choice.”

I pulled against the restrained again, hoping that maybe they had magically loosened and I could escape long enough to touch myself. Hotch crossed his arms and smiled. “Stop smiling,” I begged. He didn’t. “Fine,” I gave in, “I promise. Please, just let me go.”

“What do you say?”

“Please, Sir,” I pleaded. “I’ll behave, Sir.”

Hotch squinted shortly, trying to gauge if I meant it or not. Honestly, I hated dating a profiler. He could read me like a book and there was nothing I could do. But my desperation to be released was enough to cover up my lie, I supposed, because he came close and untied me. I immediately sat up and kissed him.

“I hate you,” I told him.

“Get dressed. They’ll be wondering where we are. I don’t need Morgan calling us a thousand times asking if you’re still alive.” He kissed me again and kneaded the inside of my thigh for fun.

* * *

Hotch was focused on the road as we drove through the streets of downtown Stafford County. The streets themselves were already quiet as everyone was at home, at a friend’s house, or at a bar to watch the game. No one was driving around during the first quarter of the Superbowl unless they were late like Hotch and I were. And I could tell that he was frustrated that we were running late, but, honestly, it was his own fault. I had only just woken up, and he was practically jumping me. And he didn’t even let me cum. Asshole.

I knew that I had made the decision. It was either once then or more later, and I took more later. I was the dumbass who chose the option that I couldn’t stand by, and he was so smug about it. He loved the thought of having edged me until I was begging, and then stopped entirely to make me yearn for him all night. He liked that I was definitely wet while sitting in the car with him. And he liked that I couldn’t stop thinking about anything but having him inside me. He liked knowing that he had the upper hand with whatever plan had been brewing in his mind all night.

And I hated that he enjoyed all of that. I thought to myself how I wasn’t about to let him win this one. I could be an asshole, too. Two could play the game. But I had to be quicker and smarter than him. He had the strength advantage, but I had the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, so… fuck it, right?

I put my finger on the seat controls on the inside of the door, just beside the handle, and pushed the button that reclined me backwards. Hotch looked over for the briefest of moments to see what I was doing before he had to turn back to the road. He saw that I was reclining a bit more than usual, but he didn’t quite understand why yet.

My finger left the button and I waited a second to just make him think that I was getting comfortable. He looked again and thought he understood enough to stop worrying, so he put more focus on the road. When the coast was clear, I carefully unbuttoned my pants and slowly pulled the zipper down so that he couldn’t hear the sound of it over the music. Lifting my hips without him noticing was the hardest part. By the time I could slide my pants halfway down my thigh, Hotch was suddenly aware of what I was doing and inquired about it. I played dumb and said that I wasn’t doing anything.

“Stop it,” he demanded.

“No.”

I pushed my pants to my knees and relaxed in my seat. Hotch’s grip was tight around the steering wheel, and I saw his nails begin to dig into the leather. Grinning to myself, I brought my hand to my panties and slowly slid my fingers under the fabric.

“Stop it right now, Y/N,” he warned. He was trying to hold himself back. He knew what I was doing, and while he didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of a punishment, I was _real_ close to earning it.

“Make me.” I gasped as my fingers slid inside my wet pussy. 

Hotch turned the right hand blinker on as we approached a parking lot of a closed business. I noticed, but I didn’t stop thrusting and curling my fingers; and I made sure to make a show of it for him, too. My moans and my hips thrusting were enough for him to speed into the empty parking lot and come to a sudden halt.

“Back seat. Now.” He opened his door and got out.

I quickly pulled my pants all the way off. As he slammed the door shut, I reached into the glovebox and grabbed a pair of emergency handcuffs we always had in there. By the time Hotch sat down in the backseat and closed the door, I hid the handcuffs behind me and crawled into the back with him. I think he half expected me to sit next to him so that we could move to where I would be lying underneath him in the small space, but I surprised him when I sat on his lap.

Hotch grabbed my thighs like he was about to flip us over, but I grabbed his wrists and kissed him deeply to distract him. As he focused on attempting to dominate our kiss in order to prove a point, I smoothly brought his hands up to my face so that his wrists would be in front of me. He cupped my cheek with care with his left hand, while his right hand grabbed my neck.

I moaned into his mouth and rolled my hips, just to keep him occupied and not thinking about where the hell my hands were and what they were doing. I grabbed the handcuffs with my right hand and grabbed his left hand with my left hand. He didn’t notice that my hands were preoccupied until I slapped one side of the handcuffs around his left wrist. He stopped kissing me and his grip on my neck slightly tightened as he watched me bring his captured hand up to the handle and looping the chain of the handcuffs around it.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked, trying to pull his hand back down, but he was stuck with the chain already pulled through. “Y/N,” he growled, pulling harder. I smirked and pulled his hand off of my neck and clasped the other side of the handcuffs over his right wrist. He panicked, trying to pull at the handcuffs, but they were trapped on the handle on the ceiling, and he wasn’t going anywhere. “You can’t be serious.” I smirked and rolled my hips again, just to bother him. He pulled again and groaned, biting his lip roughly. “Wipe that grin off your face. You’re in so much trouble, brat.”

“You’re the one handcuffed to the car.” I sat back towards his knees and leaned against the back of the driver's seat. He kept pulling as if it would suddenly free him. “Having trouble there?” I chuckled.

He stopped struggling and glared at me. “I swear to God, Y/N, if you don’t—”

“Don’t what? Let you go? Let you cum? Let you touch me?” I started unbuckling his belt while still relaxing against the seat. “What are you going to do about it, _Aaron_?” I swear he was about to break the car, that was how hard he was yanking at the handle. Before he could either break the car, the handcuffs, or his hands, I hurried to undo his pants.

Hotch’s head fell back against the headrest and he let out a moan as I took his hard length in my hands. He wasn’t pulling at the handle anymore, likely because my touch suddenly made him weak. My thumb circled his tip slowly and he moaned again. He always hated when I did that because it was always sensitive, but I knew that I had him now and I could do whatever I wanted. Payback was certainly a bitch.

“I get it now, the appeal of tying me up. I can do whatever I want to you right now and there’s nothing you could do to stop it. I could stop touching you entirely now and just sit here, and you wouldn’t be able to make me touch you.”

I would break him eventually, I had no doubts. He hated not being in control, and I knew that it would eventually get to him and he’d do anything to have the upperhand again. I just had to give it some time.

I pumped my hand up and down his shaft a little faster and he bucked his hips up for more, but I used my other hand to push his hips back down. “Don’t misbehave,” I teased.

He lifted his head up and squinted angrily at me. “Don’t tease.”

“I’ll do what I want, Aaron.”

“ _Sir_ ,” he corrected. “Sir or you won’t cum for the next we—” I brought my other hand to his cock and used it to keep ghosting my touch over his tip. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whimpered. _So_ close to breaking. I kept going, adding a little more pressure and speed as my fist around his length moved, and my other hand kept teasing his tip. “Y/N...” He was trying so hard to not beg for anything, but he needed to cum. He needed me to keep going.

I leaned in close to his ear. “Beg,” I whispered. He shook his head and hit his head against the headrest again. His hips just kept bucking, so I moved back up onto his thighs to hold him down. “Beg.”

“You’re never going to cum again, I swear…”

He was resorting to threatening me now— which was definitely his last resort. Now it was either that he would beg like I wanted him to or he would stay entirely silent. Either way, I won. I couldn’t care less what he ended up deciding. I just liked that he was pussy in my hands and I had entire control over him. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t convince me to let him go or revert to my submissive behavior.

His eyes squeezed shut and his hands turned into fists around the handle. He was so close to cumming. I could feel it. So I kept going. His breath shallowed and he bit back a moan. I smirked and pulled my hands away. 

“No—” he groaned, picking his head up again to watch as his hard cock twitched at the loss of contact. “Please. Please. Fuck. Fuck…” he whimpered, pulling at the handle again.

He looked at his erection for another moment, then to the handle for some kind of solution, and lastly to me as a plea for more. I got him. He leaned forward and tried to kiss me, so as to try and trick me into touching him again, but I dodged his attempt.

“It sucks, doesn’t it? Getting so close and then not getting to finish.”

“I get it, okay. I get it. Please.”

“Broken already, Aaron? You’d never survive if you were me.”

He groaned, “That’s because I’m not a brat like you.”

I tsked my tongue, “You always tell me to be careful with my words, but here you are, not watching yourself.”

“You have a death wish.”

“Does it make you mad that I have you like this? That I didn’t let you cum?” My left hand was back on him and he moaned again. I brought my index and middle fingers on my right hand to his mouth. “Open,” I demanded.

He did as he was told and sucked on my fingers while making direct eye contact with him. I nearly lost it at that point, too. My heart was racing in my chest and I was soaking through my panties. I needed him, but I couldn’t give up so easily on this. I had come this far, I wasn’t going to give in like he assumed I would.

I pulled my fingers from his mouth slowly and leaned down to kiss him. My right hand snaked back down between us and I moaned into his mouth as my wet fingers pressed against my clit and started rubbing fast circles.

“Don’t cum,” he told me.

“You don’t get a say in that right now.”

He bit my lip gently to pull me back since his hands couldn’t. He rolled his hips slightly and bucked them as far as I would allow him. “Faster. Please.” He was begging against my lips, trying to keep me close so that I couldn’t get a read on if he were close or not. “Please.” I gave in and pumped his length faster. “Right— right there,” he moaned breathlessly. I moaned with him as I slid my fingers inside me again. “Let me taste you. Please.”

I saw right through what he was trying to do. He was begging to trick me into stopping to make sure that I wouldn’t cum, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, so I kept working my fingers in and out of my tight pussy. “No,” I answered. He growled and pulled his hands again. “You’re close, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer, which I supposed was enough of an answer in itself. I didn’t relent, but I knew that I wasn’t going to let him tip over the edge yet either. He gave me two edges earlier because he knew that it wasn’t enough to make me cum and it wasn’t even enough to make me tired of it yet. He did it because he knew I would want more than just two edges, and after that, I’d start begging to cum. Two was just before I would start begging him, and since I hadn’t yet given him that satisfaction while we were still at home, he stopped. So I wanted to get even with him.

“I’m gonna cum. Y/N. Don’t stop. Please.” He couldn’t breathe between our kisses and his moans. He wanted to cum so bad, even if it wasn’t inside of me. Sometimes was better than nothing to him at that point. I knew that feeling all too well. “I’m… I’m gonna—”

I pulled my hand away. “You didn’t even ask.” He bucked his hips with more force this time, making me fall forward against his chest. I pulled my hand away from my panties and sat up straight again. “We’re even now,” I said breathlessly. I brought my wet fingers to his length and traced a gentle stripe up from his base to his tip. He twitched against my touch. “I think I’m done with you for now, though,” I said, getting back at him for earlier.

“I’ll let you cum,” he insisted eagerly. “That’s what you want, right? I’ll let you cum if you just let me finish. Please.”

My fingers trailed back down the side of his length. “And what about later?”

“Anything you want. Please. Please… Y/N…”

I considered. We both wanted to cum, that was given. I knew well that it wasn’t fun to be edged and just be left alone afterwards without release. He had gotten a taste of his own medicine and he couldn’t take it. I had tortured him enough, right? Besides, if he got to cum, then so did I. And that was a win-win in my book.

I braced myself using his shoulder and the window for balance as I lifted myself off of his legs. I pushed my panties to the side and lined the tip of his cock up with my entrance. I didn’t hesitate for a moment before slowly sitting down on all of him. My eyelids tightened and I moaned as he filled me up. My fingers curled in his hair as I started riding him fast and with purpose. After being edged, we were both just desperate to cum. Romance and passion was set aside for the one thing we needed: release. I needed to feel him inside me and I needed to cum soon or I’d start screaming.

“You’re so wet,” Hotch groaned. I couldn’t even think of anything to say, my mind was so fuzzy and focused on cumming. “I’m going to cum, baby.”

“I’m so close,” I whispered, pulling on his hair lightly. I lifted myself up again and rolled my hips then dropped back down. “Hotch…”

His eyes were screwed shut again and he was pulling at the handcuffs. He started groaning repeatedly and his thrusts upward matched mine. “Y/N... “

He stopped pulling and thrust into me a few more times as he came inside of me. I shook as I circled my hips around him and came with him. My walls tightened around his length as my orgasm reached its high and I called out his name. He captured my mouth in another kiss as we both came down from our highs.

We parted and he rattled the handcuffs to grab my attention. “Are these going to come off now?”

“Honestly, I’m really too scared,” I laughed.

“You’re lucky that we have to go to this party,” Hotch said.

I pushed myself up and off his cock gently, both of us hissing at the feeling. I felt so empty without him. Fuck. I stretched between the front seats and grabbed the key from the glove compartment. When I had it, I sat back on Hotch’s thighs and reached up to uncuff him.

The second one of his hands was free, it was on my neck. I froze, eyes wide, breath hitched. He let an evil laugh escape his throat. “I’m going to _ruin_ you when we get home.” I swallowed hard as he released me and commanded me to release his other hand. With extra speed fed by my adrenaline, I unlocked the other side and Hotch rubbed his wrists. He reached down and redid his pants. “Put your pants back on.”

I climbed back into the front seat while Hotch got back out to switch around to the driver’s seat again. He started the car up and without another word, we were on the road towards the bar.

At the bar, JJ came over to the door when we walked in. She was already happy to see us, as was practically everyone else. Our tardiness didn’t go unnoticed, however. Everyone seemed to notice once JJ made a big deal of it, asking where we were for so long. We practically missed the entire first quarter.

Hotch and I looked at each other for an answer. Neither of us knew how to lie about it since we were both technically in the wrong. So he told JJ that we had to drop Jack off at Haley’s. Morgan came over and inquired about this because I had told him that we weren’t going to see Jack until Wednesday night. I had to come up with something on the spot, so I lied and said that Haley wanted us to have him while she was busy shopping for the watch party she was hosting with her family. Everyone seemed to believe it, which was a relief.

“Let me get you guys some drinks,” JJ offered, hurrying off to the bar.

Hotch thanked her and took my hand. He led me to a high top table next to the wall that was facing a line of the TVs bolted higher up on another wall. I took the inside seat, right up against the wall, and Hotch took the one next to me. After we sat down and got comfortable, he put his hand on my upper thigh and just kept it there.

When JJ came back with both of her hands full of drinks for us, we thanked her again and chose our glasses. She sat down across from us, not at all concerned about the football game happening behind her. Hotch and I tried to watch, though, even when she started asking us some friendly questions like how Jack was doing, what school he was going to, and how we were handling not seeing him as often as we would have liked. Both Hotch and I took turns answering her questions, despite how distracted we were with the game and his hand on my thigh.

By the end of the quarter, two guys had come over and pulled JJ away to play darts with them. She apologized for abandoning us before hurrying off with them. I asked Hotch jokingly how many drinks he thought she had before we arrived. He said he didn’t even want to try to guess.

Emily took JJ’s place a few minutes after that. She insisted that she needed a break from dancing, so we gave her one of the many extra drinks JJ brought over for us. Unlike JJ, though, Emily turned around to watch the game with us. I leaned into Hotch’s side and rested my head on his shoulder. Our team wasn’t winning, which made it very depressing to watch as the game came to an end a few hours later.

After the game ended, Emily went to go dance with Garcia, meanwhile, Morgan came over to take a break. I was beginning to feel like the boring corner. Not because of Hotch, but because of how people only came over to hang out with us when they needed a break from dancing or were waiting to go play darts with someone. It was just odd.

“Why is it that the two of you are _always_ together? Hotch, you’ve got an amazing partner right there, take them dancing for once.” He put his feet up on the seat next to him. “I don’t even get to spend time with them anymore because the two of you are so clingy. Don’t think for a second that I don’t know why you two were late.”

I laughed. “Well, Morgan, when you finally get the balls to ask me out, we’ll spend more time together, how about that?”

Hotch’s grip on my thigh tightened territorially as the three of us laughed. Morgan picked up one of the drinks and saluted it to us before chugging.

“That’s not a bad idea. Y/N, wanna go dancing?”

I looked at Hotch, “I don’t know. _Do I?_ ”

“Come on, honey bunches, it’s just a dance. If I wanted to take you from the boss, I would’ve done it already—”

“We’ve got a case,” JJ said breathlessly, running over to our table. Morgan’s feet dropped to the floor as he stood up. “It’s bad.”

It was always bad, wasn’t it? The fact that we could never just have one night without worry of being pulled out of bed or excused from dinner because of a case. But crime never waited and it was never kind to those of us who had to clean up the mess afterwards.


	12. THE ARMIES OF SATAN WILL NOT RISE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Murder. Kidnapping. Literally everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 14. Right after part eleven.

I guess I was somewhat relieved that Hotch and I let out some steam before going to the party, because his plans of what would come after had to come to a screeching halt when we were called into work for a case. Everyone was disappointed to be leaving so soon, but when the job called, we went. That was the deal. Always. So we all jumped in our cars and headed out to Quantico.

At the office, I went straight for the coffee pot and started to make a fresh brew. JJ, Garcia, and Morgan were all tipsy— if not _drunk_ — and the best way to sober them up was coffee, food, and lots of water. So as I went to make the coffee, Morgan raided his secret stash of snacks, and Emily bought water bottles for everyone from the vending machine. By the time I got back to the boardroom with everyone’s drinks, Gideon was back from his night off and was sitting comfortably in his chair like he hadn’t left at all.

The team was all joking about Morgan’s dance moves, he was trying to deflect by pointing out yet again that Hotch and I were late to the party, and I deflected by asking where Gideon was. He told us that he had been at the Smithsonian with an old friend of his. I recalled Hotch mentioning something to me about Gideon going to D.C for the weekend, but I didn’t think he would just be _lounging_ around in the Smithsonian all night. How the hell does one even go about doing that?

JJ stormed into the boardroom and brushed past me as I sat down next between Hotch and Morgan. She threw an image of a couple up on the TV for us and began to review the case for us. The Kyles had been killed in their Atlanta home shortly after the Super Bowl ended. They were at home, the TV turned on for the big game, until the Unsub broke into their home and killed them in their upstairs bedroom. The curious thing about this case, however, had to do with the police’s unusually fast response time. The Kyles were murdered during the game, and yet, the police got there before the halftime show even started. How?

“One of the Unsubs called the police from inside of the home to warn them that the other was about to murder the victims,” JJ explained. “According to the dispatcher, the first Unsub sounded terrified and was begging for the police’s help, while the other Unsub was telling him that it had to be done and he needed to hang up the phone.” She pressed a button on the TV remote and it pulled up a crime scene photo. “The second Unsub, identified as Raphael, was the one to kill the two victims. When the police arrived, both Unsubs were gone, but they had left this on the bed,” she pressed a button again. The TV showed us a zoomed in image of a bible page that the Unsubs had left at the crime scene. Yes, only one paragraph was specifically highlighted.

“Revelations Chapter 6, Verse 8,” Hotch said. “And I looked in behold a pale horse, and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

“So they’re religiously motivated. Unsubs with a mission don’t usually stop their work after just one or two victims. They go on a spree that leaves a trail of blood in their wake,” I explained, turning away from the TV to get Reid’s back up on my statement.

He nodded. “Yeah, if these guys are using the bible as an excuse to murder, then they’re not going to stop until they think that they’ve cleared the world of all sinners. But sin is relative and fluid… So, technically, _everyone’s_ a sinner.”

“That means they’re going to be looking for another victim and they’re going to kill them soon,” Morgan added.

Hotch picked up his copy of the case file, tapped it on the desk, sighed, and said, “Wheels up in thirty.”

We all let out quiet sighs. This was the job, though, right? It didn’t matter if we were ever promised time off, because the cases always had to come first. The Kyles were brutally murdered in their home while we were out having fun in a bar, and we were upset that we had to fly to Georgia? Something felt off about that to me… But I couldn’t shake the disappointment of not getting one more night alone with Hotch or even the chance to say goodbye to Jack before we would leave. All we could make time for was grabbing our go bags, changing in the bathrooms, then hopefully being able to call Haley on the plane and ask if we could talk to Jack. That was it. But at least we had that when the Kyles didn’t.

On the plane, before taking off, when I was sitting with Morgan in the back, Hotch came over to tell me that he had Jack on the phone. I excused myself to Morgan before going with Hotch over towards the cockpit where we were most likely to have enough privacy— Even though Gideon, Emily, and Spencer were already busy with looking over the case to spend time eavesdropping on me and Hotch.

“Hi, daddy,” Jack said over the phone.

“Hey, bud. Did you watch the game with mom?” Hotch asked.

“Yeah. We lost.”

“We sure did,” Hotch chuckled quietly. Jack didn’t know much about football. He was too young to know how the game was played or why certain things would happen, but he liked it because his dad liked it. “Listen, bud, we’re calling to tell you that we won’t be able to pick you up from school tomorrow. We’ve got to go save the world again.”

“Y/N can’t come get me?”

Hotch looked to me to respond, and I took the opportunity. “I’m sorry, little man, we’re both going to be gone.”

“Hotch, Garcia just sent the police call over,” JJ told us, taking a seat with Morgan on the couch as everyone huddled up. 

We nodded in her direction to let her know we understood and that we were wrapping up our call with Jack. I leaned into Hotch slightly. “We’ll come see you when we get back, though, alright, little man?” I asked, squeezing Hotch’s shoulder. “We love you so much.”

“I love you, too,” Jack said.

“Hotch—” Morgan called.

I shooed my hand at him to tell him to be quiet for just another minute. Hotch hovered his thumb over the hang up button and told Jack “goodnight” and “I love you” one more time before hanging up and burying his phone in his pocket. Hotch and I took seats separate from one another, yet still ensuring that we could see the computer screen. Garcia was waiting patiently for us to appear on her screen before playing the 911 call for us.

The operator answered the call first with the script that she had likely repeated over a million times for various reasons. After her opening script line ended, the first Unsub began speaking. He was calm, yet the fluctuations in his voice revealed a panic or a worry of some kind, but he didn’t rush his words like he was trying to get the cops to show up any sooner than the four minute arrival time they ended up making. He never mentioned Raphael until the end of the call when he finally admitted that Raphael was going to kill the Kyles. When the operator asked for clarification, the second Unsub’s voice could be heard controlling the first Unsub, telling him that he needed to hang up the phone. The first Unsub tried to refuse, but Raphael lowered his voice and used a more demanding tone that ended up working, and the call ended.

I asked Garcia to play the call again and Gideon asked what had caught my attention. When I told him that I was unsure and needed to hear it again to get a better understanding, he gave Garcia the go ahead. I tried to focus on the first Unsub. I knew that the rest of the team was going to be more concerned about Raphael, as he was certainly the disorganized one of the two, but there was something odd about the Unsub’s behavior in comparison to his voice in the call.

The first Unsub was calling the police, which meant that he wanted to help the Kyles somehow. He was arguing with Raphael, but he wasn’t running away, seeking out help from the neighbors, or even trying to physically stop Raphael. If the Unsub felt that he was in danger with Raphael, it would have made sense to call 911, sure, but why not run away? That was the odd part. His physical and verbal reactions to the situation were total contradictions of one another. Was he being forced to be there? Well, if that were the case, then Raphael wouldn’t have given him the chance to call 911. And it sounded like Raphael was standing right there when the first Unsub called the police, so why didn’t he stop it sooner? Did he want the cops to come? Did he want _us_ to come?

The only way I could put together the pieces was to try and make some kind of connection with these guys. They were a typical dominant and submissive pair— or at least they _should_ have been typical, but this was a moment that their dynamic slipped. Why? With me and Hotch, I liked to push back in order to rile him up, to force him into the dominant mindset where he would practically force me into being submissive. That was part of the appeal, part of the fun. If the Unsubs were dominant and submissive personalities, it could have been possible that the first Unsub was calling the police in order to rile up Raphael somehow. Perhaps it was a sexual aspect of the murders. But there was no sign of sexual assault against either victim. So, then… why… Why fight against the dominant and grow submissive when he gets stern if not to please themselves?

When the replay of the call ended, they all looked to me for answers, but I still didn’t have any. My role as the one who could find the smallest of details and make a point of them was failing me in that moment. These Unsubs had warped my definition of a classic dominant and submissive relationship for psychopaths. In past cases, they were almost always the same, but these Unsubs didn’t fit the bill. Something wasn’t right with them. I needed to see the bodies to know more about Raphael in order to know more about the submissive Unsub, too.

Hotch got the idea before I could say anything, like he could read my mind or something. As he was giving everyone their assignments, he told me and Emily that we should head down to the morgue to talk with the coroner, and so that I could get a look at the bodies myself. Hotch told JJ to get more images of the victims and help sort out the victimology, and that Reid, Morgan, and Gideon were going to head to the crime scene to evaluate how Raphael managed to kill two people in under four minutes. When Morgan asked what Hotch would be doing, he answered that he’d be heading down to the police station to sort through old, unsolved cases because this wouldn’t be the first rodeo for a team like this with a very specific M.O and the ability to do it in four minutes.

It all sounded like a viable plan, and we all agreed to our assignments. JJ and Hotch sat together the rest of the flight to review victimology, while Gideon, Morgan, and Reid stayed at the large table to review the crime scene, and Emily and I sat together to look at photos of the victims. I managed to steal the laptop at one point, though, and listened to the 911 call repeatedly with headphones on. There had to be something else I was missing in there. I could sense it. And I just knew that if I gave it a little more time and attention, I would finally be able to put the pieces together.

At the morgue, Emily and I introduced ourselves to the coroner who had just completed whole autopsies on both victims. Emily asked for his professional opinion on what he saw while we were still talking in the hallway outside, but I asked if I could go in and take a look at the bodies for myself. The coroner shrugged and told me to go right ahead, knowing that it was probably just a waste of my time when he could just tell us everything we needed to know. But I just… I _needed_ to see them for myself.

The coroner’s assistant was still cleaning up in the autopsy room when I walked in. Both victims were still laying on separate slabs, but they were covered with new, clean white sheets. The assistant acknowledged my entrance briefly before turning back to his work. I approached the bodies, starting with Mr. Kyle, and pulled away the sheet that was covering his body. The most obvious thing about him was the laceration on his throat, which was likely the cause of death. Looking down, his right arm had a gash running from his wrist to elbow, and his left leg had a similar cut from his crotch to just above the knee. All major arteries. All tactical. All precise. All straight, not jagged like you would expect from an unhinged Unsub like we presumed Raphael to be. Still, there were no bruises or scratches, either, which would have suggested that the first Unsub could have possibly held the victim down while Raphael cut him up. But there was no sign of a struggle. So they did this quickly and efficiently.

I covered Mr. Kyle up again and walked over to Mrs. Kyle to examine her, too. Her neck had been slashed, aswell, and there were identical cuts on her arm and leg. A submissive personality wasn’t likely to be this imitative, even if they were to entirely obey their dominant— which the first Unsub proved that he had doubts about his own loyalty. He wouldn’t have hung up the phone to just go upstairs with Raphael and follow along in a how-to-murder tutorial of sorts. No, Raphael did both of these. But he wasn’t chaotic, enraged, or disorganized, which were all telltale signs of a dominant personality. These murders weren’t abusive in any way. They were meticulous, but they weren’t brutal.

Emily came in with the doctor so that he could show her what they had been discussing outside. They discussed everything I already noticed, but there was something critical that he had overlooked. The cut on the neck was the last thing that Raphael did to the victims. The cuts on the arm and leg were deep and wide— so much so that one would bleed out within minutes if they were left unattended for too long— but they also looked older than the cut on the neck. Raphael must have made the cuts on the arms and legs of the victims while the first Unsub called the police with the intent of having the victims bleed out; but when they were put on a time crunch, Raphael slit their throats and they ran.

“Isn’t that what slaughterhouses do?” Emily questioned.

The coroner nodded, “Precisely.”

“So we’re dealing with Unsubs who have worked in a slaughterhouse.”

“This is rural Georgia… Everyone down here has worked on a farm where they need to have this kind of experience. If you’re trying to narrow down the suspect list based on that career choice, you’ll find that the list won’t shrink down too far.”

Emily sighed and looked at me. There weren’t many answers I had about narrowing the suspect list down, but I had an idea or two about the Unsubs’ dynamic now. And I was sure that I had figured out what happened last night when the Kyles were murdered. All that I needed to confirm my suspicions was Morgan, Reid, and Gideon’s analysis of the crime scene.

* * *

At the field office in Atlanta, everyone was already back from their assignments when Emily and I arrived. Hotch and JJ were sitting at a desk with stacks of files almost as tall as them, while Gideon and Morgan were watching a video on a computer, and Reid was examining a separate computer that they had found at the crime scene. Morgan called me over when he saw me and asked Gideon to start the video over. He asked me to just watch the video and tell them what I saw right off the bat— to go with my gut. My _thing_ was to catch things at a first glance, and they really needed me to come through with that.

The first Unsub, the submissive, was sitting in front of a camera, hiding behind a hood in the shadows. We couldn’t see his face, and we could hardly tell his body shape. There was no real way of knowing what this guy looked like, but I knew his voice from the 911 call, and there was no doubt that it was the first Unsub. He was talking about the punishments for sinning. The world was plagued by disgusting creatures who enjoyed sin and invited it into the mundane world in order to prey on the innocent. They were just cleaning the world of these sinners through murder. The Unsub never directly said it, but I got the impression that he saw the sinners— their victims— as demons from Hell.

When someone started speaking from behind the camera, he started quoting another bible passage— just like they had left at the crime scene. But it wasn’t the first Unsub, nor was it Raphael. It was a third Unsub. After reciting the bible, the third Unsub said that we would all pay seven times. Seven victims. The Kyles were the first two, which meant that there were still five more to come. The footage of the first Unsub sitting in the dark cut out and dissolved into the recorded footage of the murders.

“Woah, wait,” I reached between Morgan and Gideon to pause the video. “Where did you guys find this?”

“The video was on that computer,” Morgan pointed to Reid, who was dusting off the fan of a laptop. “We found the computer itself sitting on a sofa.”

“The computer recorded this, not a camera?”

They both shook their heads and I continued the video. They Kyles didn’t seem to notice the computer or that anything was out of place as they stumbled around their bedroom, desperately trying to rid each other of their clothes. So they didn’t notice that a strange computer was sitting on the sofa in their master bedroom, and they didn’t notice that it was recording anything— even though the computer was in clear view and they would have seen it if it weren’t there before. So the Unsubs didn’t bring it with them. They couldn’t have if they had only just got into the house to have time to make the call and murder the Kyles. It was their computer— that was why they didn’t care about it.

As Mr. Kyle stood to take off his shirt, Raphael came into the bedroom, pulled Mr. Kyle to the ground, and started carving. Mrs. Kyle got up from the bed and started running to the bathroom so as to lock herself in and save herself. And then the video ended.

“So?” Morgan asked me.

“The first Unsub was the one who was willing to be filmed,” I started.

“What about it?”

“Well, normally, the submissives like to hide and just obey. The dominants are the ones who are the face of everything because they have the bolder, stronger personalities. But they decided to put the first Unsub on screen.” That was just another odd piece about their dynamic to add to the pile. Great. “And now there’s a third Unsub, which changes everything we know about these guys. The third Unsub, though… It’s something about him and Raphael, something that I noticed about how they talk. In the 911 call, Raphael says ‘he’ and the first Unsub in this video says ‘he’ as, well—”

“It could be referring to God,” Gideon interrupted.

I shook my head insistently, “No, I don’t think so. The third Unsub in this video says ‘we’, not ‘he’. If they were referring to God, all three of them would have said ‘he’, but they didn’t. I think that they were referring to the third Unsub this whole time. Raphael is the dominant but—” A realization hit me. “I actually… I think I might have a profile for them…”

“All three? Already?” Morgan questioned in shock.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?” Gideon clarified.

He knew that it was possible for me to have already built part of a case, but not the entire one— especially when we didn’t have more victims yet to compare victimology, and I hadn’t seen the crime scene. But I didn’t need to. I knew how these guys were operating. I knew their dynamic, or hierarchy, if you will. I had it.

“Uh… Guys…” Reid whispered, standing up from the desk he was working at. He moved away from the computer. “I think I figured something out.”

“What? What is it?” Gideon asked.

“Something struck me as odd while watching the video earlier,” he started explaining. “The computer, it belongs to the Kyles. The Unsubs didn’t put it there to film the murders.” That much I knew, but I didn’t get where he was going with it. “They, uh,” he looked back at the computer nervously, “they’re still watching. They hacked the computer.”

“Can they hear us?” I asked with wide eyes. The whole investigation could be going down the drain. If they were listening, they would know that we were onto them.

He shook his head, “No, but they can see everything.”

We all slowly moved towards the computer to get a look as it started beeping. Reid sat back down to see what was going on. Hotch and JJ ran over when Morgan whistled to catch their attention. The screen of the computer turned black, like it had been turned off remotely, then flashed the words: THE ARMIES OF SATAN WILL NOT RISE. And then the computer shut down entirely. Spencer cursed under his breath as he started fidgeting with all of the components of the computer just to try to turn it back on, but to no avail.

Hotch then told Reid to get the computer to Garcia ASAP, but we all had questions about how the Unsubs even did this. So the first resort was to call Garcia for answers. She told us that anyone could control a computer remotely, but it was usually done when a company would help you with tech support. Emily asked the big question of how the Unsubs could still have access after dealing with a customer, if he really was in tech support. She told us that it was entirely possible that the Unsubs could have left a Trojan Horse of some kind that continued to give him access and control of the computer.

“If you have that profile ready, we _have_ to give it now,” Gideon told me. “They could be watching more potential victims right now. They could strike at any time.”

I nodded an agreement and the whole team started moving to the boardroom where we could discuss the profile privately. The lead detective and the local sheriff were both off handling the crime scene clean up, so we decided that it would be best to discuss and build the profile immediately, then JJ would just hand out a written version of it to every nearby precinct.

I stood at the board where we had pinned up all of the crime scene photos and evidence like the bible passage that had been left in the bedroom. Gideon, JJ, Reid, Morgan, and Emily all sat around the table, but Hotch was sitting on a waist high bookshelf in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest. They wanted me to start with the first Unsub, then the second, and lastly the third. Sounded easy enough.

“The first Unsub, the one who called the police the night of the murders, he’s our submissive—”

“But there are more than two Unsubs. How can they be submissive and dominant?” Gideon interrogated.

I sighed. _Giving_ the profile _sounded_ easy enough, but actually being able to do it without being interrupted every five seconds was going to be the challenge. “I’ll explain, I promise. The first Unsub is the submissive when it comes to the three of them. He was unsure about what they were doing to the Kyles, but he was quick to listen to Raphael when he told him to put the phone down. He also didn’t kill the victims—”

“How do you know that?”

“When I examined both bodies myself, I determined that both victims had been murdered by the same Unsub. The attacks were precise and aimed to kill painfully, but they weren’t disorganized like you would expect from a dominant—”

“So the first Unsub _did_ kill them?”

“No. I think the third Unsub did. The first Unsub was concerned with calling the police, he wouldn’t have the guts to murder the Kyles himself, but he was also listening to a higher authority, like Raphael. Raphael was downstairs with the first Unsub while he called the police, which meant that he didn’t go back upstairs and kill the Kyles because he was busy commanding the first Unsub. Raphael is the dominant. The reason the first Unsub felt safe _enough_ to call the police is because Raphael isn’t the one he’s scared of. It’s the third Unsub, the abuser. The abuser is the one who has the thirst for blood, and Raphael gives him the opportunity to do so because he keeps the first Unsub out of the way.”

“But wouldn’t the submissive have still been scared of Raphael because he’s the dominant?”

“No. They challenge each other because the Unsub sees it as a game of cat and mouse almost, it gives them a rush of sorts. The abuser is the violent one that the submissive doesn’t want to cross, even if it is just a game. Calling the police was a game for the dominant and submissive, but it put the abuser on edge, which was why he cut the victims’ throats.”

“Normally the submissives don’t like to _play_ around with the dominants. They want to listen and obey out of fear of punishment for misbehaving. Why would they want to play just to get a rush out of it? How could you even come to that assumption?”

I gulped and looked at Hotch quickly. I couldn’t say flat out: “personal experience” because that would raise more questions than we had time for. But not giving them an answer would just discredit my profiles. “I, um…” I cleared my throat and shifted my gaze away from Hotch when I saw him glaring at me to tell me not to say anything. “Based on their behaviors. That’s how I know. The submissive was likely told by the dominant to film that video, but the abuser is the one who wants to get the word of God out to the world, so he interrupted and took over the commentary. The dominant allowed the submissive to call the police, but only let it get to a certain extent before stopping him. The submissive is trying to impress the dominant, but the abuser keeps getting in the way.”

“So the first Unsub is the submissive. He’s the organized one, but also the most apprehensive about their mission. He makes sure that they use forensic countermeasures— such as gloves— to make sure that they’re never caught. The second Unsub, Raphael, is the dominant. He’s also organized, but in a way that plays with the submissive’s behavior. He’s organized for the sake of their dynamic, but disorganized when it comes to the crimes. If he’s trying to give the submissive opportunities to prove himself, then the second Unsub is the one who likely has the technological knowledge to find the victims. The third Unsub is the abuser. He’s the one who wants to get the message out. He doesn’t care how they get there or what else happens with the dominant and submissive, he just cares that they kill the members of Satan’s army.” Reid explained all of that while pouring himself a coffee and moving up to the board to look through the evidence again.

“We get their dynamic. Great. But it doesn’t tell us anything about finding them,” Morgan commented, picking up another copy of one of the crime scene photos.

“Back to the drawing boards, then, with the profiles we now have,” Hotch ordered us.

Gideon and Morgan left to go review something about the crime scene or the video the Unsubs posted to the internet. Emily went to go see if she could help with that or figure out any connection to a farm using the knowledge we gained from the autopsies. Hotch, Reid, JJ, and I all stayed in the boardroom. As Reid sat back down with JJ, Hotch stood from leaning against the short bookshelf and walked over to the board I was standing at. We both turned to face the board and go through _everything_ we knew.

“You need to be more careful when you’re talking about those kinds of things,” Hotch whispered under his breath, but just loud enough for me to hear. “They don’t teach that kind of thinking in the academy, and Gideon knows it.”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I whispered back, pulling the bible page off the board. Forensics had already looked at it, but they didn’t find any fingerprints. “It’s just another profile.”

“A profile that you based on your own life. Don’t think I forgot about how you liked to _play_ last night.”

“I said I was sorry, didn’t I?”

He sucked in a quiet breath past his teeth. “You’ll have to tell me again after this case.”

I was facing him instead of the board now, “Cat and mouse. See?” I smirked. My profile hadn’t been wrong and Hotch’s worry had been misplaced.

My smirk faded as JJ came up to us with a case file. “I think I found something,” she said, handing the file over to Hotch. “Since we couldn’t find any connections with unsolved cases, I started looking at it another way with Reid. We found this report. Someone called the police to report that there was someone watching and trying to get into the Kyles’ house. The witness was walking his dog, and on his way back to his car, he saw a man in dark clothing trying to break into the home.”

“There was only one man?” Hotch questioned. JJ nodded. It was curious that there weren’t three, if it were the Unsubs originally casing the house or even trying to commit the murders earlier. “And the witness?”

“Tobias Hankle. He lives about an hour from here.”

“He didn’t see anything about the suspect?” I asked.

“Nothing but the black clothes.”

Hotch sighed and scratched his stubble. “I mean, it’s certainly a long shot, but we’re not making much progress here. Why don’t you and Reid go talk to Hankle at his home and see if he remembers anything else about that night.”

“Okay,” JJ said, taking the file back from Hotch. Her and Reid collected their things from the table and headed out of the precinct together.

Hotch turned back to me, “You need to find a way to behave yourself during cases.”

“I was proving a point,” I told him.

“And every time you do, all I think about is last night—” He stopped himself. “Just…” He looked around the room just to triple check that we were alone. “ _Behave_.”

“Yes, Sir,” I smirked again and turned back to the board.

The door to the room opened, “Agent Hotchner.” It was the lead detective on the case. He must have just come back from the crime scene. “We got another call. There’s been another murder.”

“Shit…” Hotch groaned.

* * *

We drove out to the new crime scene with the rest of the team. When we got there, the sheriff met us outside to give us a run down of what his men found. The Unsubs had called again, but this time only Raphael spoke, not the first Unsub, which was the first unusual thing about this crime scene compared to the last one. The next was the police response time, which was eleven minutes compared to the four prior. The last thing the sheriff told us was that the man who was dead in the upstairs bedroom wasn’t the man who lived in that house. He told us that the Douglas couple lived there, and that Mr. Douglas was away at work, while Mrs. Douglas was supposed to be at home. The man found upstairs was the local handyman, and Mrs. Douglas was nowhere to be found.

“Is he nude?” I asked about the male victim. The sheriff raised a brow at me and slowly nodded, “They were having an affair.”

“Y/N, Emily, go check the body since you guys saw the last ones,” Hotch ordered.

We hurried past our team together and skipped steps on the staircase in order to get to the top floor. The forensics team was just clearing out of the bedroom as Emily and I headed in, putting on the rubber gloves they supplied for us. Just as I had suspected, the victim was naked when he was murdered by our Unsubs. He was laying face down on the ground, but there was blood pooling from his neck, arm, and crotch, just like the other victims.

Emily noticed the computer sitting on the desk and held me back before I could step in front of it. “Don’t look at the camera,” she told me, pointing to the computer. I nodded and we stepped into its field of view together.

We crouched down with our backs to the camera and started to examine the body. Same lacerations, same M.O., but no note. If they were supposed to be messengers from God, then why didn’t they leave anything from the bible this time? Were they scared of fingerprints? Were they in a rush? Why change up the M.O. just when their message was finally being heard?

I grabbed my phone and dialed Garcia. “Speak at once, mere mortal!” she announced in my ear.

“Hey, can you do me a favor? We’ve got another computer in this house with us, and we think it’s streaming right back to the Unsubs. Can you trace it?”

“If it’s connected to the internet, I sure can. I’ll call and let you know what I find.”

“Thanks, Garcia.”

“Now, be gone, mortal!” And she hung up.

I put my phone back in my pocket.

“There’s not much here that we don’t already know,” Emily said. “They didn’t change anything but the bible page. If they were having an affair, one would think that they would have at least ten different pages laying around about adultery.”

Morgan knocked on the door. “Hotch wants to talk outside with everyone.”

Emily and I pushed ourselves to our feet and carefully walked out of the room while making sure to not notice the computer. Garcia would call back in a few minutes with either good or bad news, and I was just praying that it was good news. We needed a new lead or these guys were going to keep getting away with murder.

When we got outside, Hotch asked us if there was anything of importance in the crime scene to take note of, and we both shook our heads. “Fine, so what do we know about these guys?”

“They called the cops, but this time Raphael did it. But why?” Morgan questioned.

“They saw that we were catching onto them because of the computer. We spooked them, so the dominant stepped in to protect the submissive this time around,” I answered.

But as I said it, I realized that it didn’t make much sense in the context of these guys. With me and Hotch, he got protective and defensive about nearly everything that had to do with me, but that was because there was a romantic aspect involved. Psychopaths and sociopaths don’t have the ability to love, and we had proven that the dominant and submissive’s game was to excite each other about the crime, not to protect each other.

I tried to take a step back to look at it from another angle. “Do we know what Raphael said on the phone?”

“‘Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and then that commit adultery’,” Hotch said. “Gideon says that they’re talking about Jezebel. The Unsubs knew that they were having an affair because of the computer again.”

Something was wrong about all of this still. Why did Raphael call, and why did he quote the bible when that was the third Unsub’s purpose? If the submissive wasn’t calling the police, and he wasn’t with the third Unsub out of fear of the violence, then where was he? And how did they take Mrs. Douglas all at the same time? None of the personalities were aligning, that was the problem. If they had, the timeline would have made sense, but it didn’t.

A thought struck me about what could have been happening, but I didn’t have Reid there to give me more information. He was still off with JJ at Tobias Hankle’s house, trying to collect any information about that night he witnessed someone trying to get into the Kyles’ house. But when it came to psychopathic submissives and dominants, they _never_ switched roles. Not like this, at least, which was why something occurred to me, but I just couldn’t be sure without Reid. I didn’t have anyone there to back up or correct my theory. But I had to try, right?

“What if… What if we’re not even dealing with three Unsubs?”

They all looked at me. Hotch was the first to verbalize their confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I think that we’ve been looking at this all wrong. There aren’t three Unsubs. There’s only one.”

“How’s that possible?” Morgan questioned with a slight chuckle.

“Dissociative Personality Disorder— more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.”

“You mean that there’s one Unsub who believes that he’s three different people?”

I nodded, “The submissive is the one that protects the host, but he got scared, so the dominant came forward this time to protect the submissive. The dominant is the mediator between the submissive and the abuser. He’s the one who tries to protect and entertain the submissive, while also encouraging the abuser’s behavior. The abuser, the third personality, he’s the true psychopath. He’s the one who wants to inflict the pain. Together, they make one man who is three personalities stuck inside of his mind that have been created for different purposes: protection, mediation, and violence.”

“They’re right,” Gideon said to all of us as he stormed out of the house with a bible page in hand. “I found this next to the telephone near the back door, which was unlocked.” He handed the paper to Hotch. “‘Power was given unto them over the fourth part of the Earth. To kill with sword, with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the Earth’,” he quoted from memory. “Raphael is one of the Archangels. Mrs. Douglas is Jezebel. You figure out the rest.”

“He thinks that he’s an Archangel sent by God to cleanse the Earth, that’s why he’s the mediator. He doesn’t want to see the innocent harmed, but he wants to see the sinners suffer. Mrs. Douglas is an adulterer, so he views her as Jezebel.”

“Yeah, well, if Mrs. Douglas is Jezebel, there’s an especially unpleasant death in her future,” Hotch commented.

“How do you mean?”

“Jezebel was eaten alive by dogs.”

My phone started ringing. I answered the call, “Garcia, please tell me you have some good news for me.”

“Unfortunately not, my pretty. There’s been another video uploaded to the internet.”

“You’re joking. Is it the handyman murder?”

“No. Worse. Did you guys have a missing woman you were looking for?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Douglas. Why?”

“Well, you won’t be looking for her anymore.”

“How come?”

“The Unsubs just released a new video of her… being eaten alive by a pack of dogs.”

I looked up at Hotch and Gideon, “We’re too late.”

“I’m sending the video to you guys now. Can you get to a computer?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

I started heading back inside and everyone followed me. I stayed on the phone with Garcia as we all marched back up into the bedroom where the computer was still sitting open. I didn’t care if this poor bastard saw my face. We knew that he couldn’t hear us, Spencer said so himself. I wanted this guy to see me. I wanted him to know that we were onto him.

I pulled up the video Garcia sent over and pressed play. It was the first Unsub on camera again— though, I supposed that if I were indeed correct, then it was our _only_ Unsub on screen, but it was the submissive personality that was reading from the bible. He was reading a passage about Jezebel’s death, Mrs. Douglas chained up and gagged behind him. Just as he finished reciting it, the Unsub set the dogs upon her.

I went to turn off the video, but the sheriff, who had just entered the room to see what we were looking at, stopped me. We all watched as he stepped closer to the computer to get a better look.

He pointed to the dogs, “I know these dogs— I mean, I know the owner. Those dogs attacked someone a couple of months ago, and I would’ve impounded them, but the victim knew the owner and didn’t want to press charges.”

“Are you sure that those are the same dogs?” Gideon asked.

The sheriff nodded, “As God as my witness.”

“Who’s the owner?”

“Hankle. Tobias Hankle.”

“Wait,” Hotch stepped in, “Tobias Hankle?” The sheriff nodded again. “Shit,” he wiped his hands over his face. “JJ and Spencer drove out there to talk to him. He was the witness who called the cops to tell them that someone was trying to break into the Kyles’ house a few months ago. How far from here is Hankle’s home?”

“About an hour and forty-five minutes.”

“The sun will be down by then. Garcia,” Hotch called to her through my phone, “can you try to get ahold of Reid or JJ?”

“On it,” she hung up immediately to call them.

We all ran back to the cars. Morgan grabbed all of the bulletproof vests from the car before jumping in with us. Hotch immediately floored it with the sirens and lights on the second everyone was in our car. Morgan started passing out our vests, and we put them on as fast as we could, despite the hour and forty-five minute drive that we had ahead of us. I tried to call Garcia to see if she got ahold of either Reid or JJ, but the signal died just as we left the suburbs and started driving the forty-five minutes through middle of nowhere Georgia towards Atlanta, where we would then have another hour to drive out to Hankle’s house.

“Could you get through to them?” Hotch asked after he noticed that I put my phone away. I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have sent them out there. We should have made him come into the station for questioning.”

“You thought he was just a witness, Hotch. You can’t blame yourself.”

“I’m their supervisor. Their safety is my responsibility. I shouldn’t have sent them out there, he repeated as if it would change the situation we were in.

“Y/N’s right, Hotch,” Morgan said. “This isn’t on you.”

Hotch’s grip around the steering wheel tightened. He heard us and he knew that we were right, but he just couldn’t force himself to believe it until we would find Reid and JJ safe and alive.

* * *

It was an hour and forty-five minutes of driving to Hankle’s house. An hour and forty-five minutes of worrying about them. An hour and forty-five minutes of Hotch sitting in silence as he ran through every regret he had. And the worst part was, there was nothing I could do to ease his nerves or conscience.

When we arrived at Tobias Hankle’s home, everything suddenly started to make sense about him and the profiles we built. Emily and I had profiled the Unsub as someone who had experience slaughtering animals, and we weren’t far off. Hankle lived on a farm out in the middle of nowhere. There was a house up front, behind it a large barn, and just past that was a vast sea of tall crops that anyone could get lost in.

The black SUV we were riding in slid a bit on the loose dirt path beneath us. The sheriff spread his men out with different assignments, and Hotch did the same for us. Hotch sent me and Morgan to the barn, while Emily, Gideon, and Hotch were all going to check the large house. The sheriff handed one walkie to me and one to Hotch for emergencies.

“You stay with me. The entire time. Got it?” he clarified with me as we started running around the house and towards the barn. I nodded and turned on my flashlight.

We approached the two large doors of the barn and we pressed our backs against the outside walls, just beside the hinges. He held up three fingers and slowly started counting down. When his hand was in a fist, we both pushed our backs off of the walls, turned around, and kicked the doors in. We headed in with our guns and flashlights raised, but we stayed silent as we moved through the dark.

Morgan pointed his flashlight at the carcass of a dog and looked up at me to make sure that I saw it. I nodded. Three dogs killed Mrs. Douglas on the video. One down, two more to go. We continued on through the barn, and I found the next dog. Only one more left. We kept moving and I found the stable to the left where Mrs. Douglas was mauled and eaten alive. The last dog was in there. Each of them had been shot, they hadn’t started eating each other or any other cause of death imaginable for them. Shot.

“Did Hankle kill them after he was done with them?” I questioned while peeking into the stable to take a look at everything. There was no trace of Mrs. Douglas. No bones, no flesh, no limbs, just blood. Blood everywhere. On the wood of the stables, on the mattress that had been put in there, on the hay beneath the mattress. So much blood. But nothing else.

“FBI!” someone called from the stable behind us.

Morgan and I turned with our weapons raised, my finger on the trigger. When I saw JJ staring back at us with her own weapon raised, I lowered mine. She was looking around frantically, not realizing that it was me and Morgan who had found her. Morgan tried to lower his weapon, too, to show that it was just him and that she was going to be alright, but she was still in a panic and couldn’t put two and two together.

“JJ, it’s just us— Morgan and Greenaway,” Morgan said, taking careful steps closer to her.

She slowly lowered her gun, but she still looked at us with wide eyes. “Tobias Hankle is the Unsub.”

“Yeah, we know. Y/N, call an ambulance.”

I stepped away to talk into the comms in order to call for an ambulance. No one on the team responded, so I tried the walkies that the sheriff handed to me before we split off. I called for an ambulance again, and one of the dispatchers responded that they were already sending one, but it was still a few minutes away. I lifted my wrist again for the team comms to ask if anyone had eyes on Reid, but Emily responded to say that the house was cleared and empty.

“JJ,” I turned back to her, “where’s Reid?”

“I… Um…” She held her head in her palms like she was trying to remember where she last saw him. “We said that we were going to split up. He went around the back, but he never came in.”

Morgan was already on his toes and running out the back of the barn to go find Spencer. I tried yelling after him to tell him to wait up, but he was gone. He was the one who wanted to stay with me and make sure we didn’t split off, but the second he heard that something was wrong with Reid, he was only focused on finding him. Knowing that I couldn’t leave JJ to chase after him, I offered her my hand and we headed out of the barn and towards the cars to wait for the ambulance. Emily, Gideon, and Hotch were talking on the porch of the house with the sheriff about what they found in the house. I opened one of the car doors for JJ and let her sit down while I stood by.

“They just… They tore her apart,” JJ whispered. “There was nothing left of her…” She looked at me. “I had to kill them. The dogs. They were still hungry, even after all of that… And when Reid didn’t come in after hearing the gunshots, I knew that something was wrong, but I was too… I was too paralyzed to go looking for him…”

“This isn’t your fault, JJ. You didn’t know. No one did.”

“We shouldn’t have split up. I told him that we shouldn’t’ve, but he didn’t listen to me.”

The ambulance’s sirens and lights made an appearance for the first time down the road as they came speeding up to the house. I helped JJ back to her feet and led her over to the ambulance just after it parked. The EMTs jumped out of the vehicle and opened up the back so that JJ could sit down again while they checked on her. When she was in safe hands, I took a step away and looked back at the barn to see if Morgan was back with Reid yet, but there was no sign of either of them.

“Morgan!” I called out, running back over to the silent barn. When he didn’t respond from inside, I called over to Emily, and she ran down from the porch to meet me. “Morgan ran into the field to find Reid. They’re not back yet.” She knew what that meant as well as I did, so we started running. We headed around the barn and to the edge of the field. “Morgan! Reid!” No response. “Morgan!” Still nothing. I looked to Emily and we nodded to each other before running into the field together. “Morgan! Reid!” Nothing but the sounds of me and Emily pushing through the tall stalks of wheat. “Derek! Spencer!” Maybe calling them by their first names would catch their attention. Just maybe. “Derek!”

“I’m over here,” he said just to my left. He didn’t scream, but he didn’t whisper it either. He sounded like he had meant to scream, but he seemed defeated somehow. Emily and I changed directions to find him standing in the middle of the field on a small path, his head lowered. “He’s not here,” Morgan whispered, kicking at some of the rocks. “There’s drag marks and blood. But there’s no Reid.”

“Hankle took him?” Emily asked.

“That son of a bitch…”

I walked up to Morgan and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me, anger glossing over his eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about it tonight, Morgan,” I told him. “We won’t find him running in the dark like this. We’ll just get turned around ourselves.”

“They’re right,” Emily backed me up. “We need to regroup and profile Hankle if we’re going to find Spencer.”

Morgan nodded understandingly. Emily and I were right. Running around like headless chickens wasn’t going to do Spencer any good, even if Hankle hadn’t taken him and he was just lost. We would send out a search party in the morning, and I was sure that Hotch and the sheriff already closed down every road out of town. If Hankle took Reid, he wasn’t going to get far. But we all just needed to collect ourselves and catch our breaths. We had JJ, and she could help us profile and find Hankle. We were all set to catch him soon. Morgan just needed to hold onto faith.

The three of us headed back to the house. Gideon and Hotch were inside, and JJ was finishing up with the EMTs. No trip to the hospital for her, which was good. She spotted us arriving from the field and pushed past the medics to talk to us. She asked if we found Reid, even though he clearly wasn’t with us. When Morgan walked past her without a word and I couldn’t look at her, she guessed, but Emily finally told her the truth.

I didn’t say another word to JJ before walking past her, too, and heading into Tobias Hankle’s house to talk with the rest of the team about what they found. They were all standing in a computer room on the first floor on the left side of the building. There were more computers and monitors in that one room than I had ever seen in Penelope’s office— and that was saying something. Some were vintage computers from the 80’s, others were brand-spankin’ new. But what mattered was that Tobias Hankle did have all of the computers to watch his potential victims, and he had the technological knowledge to use them in order to hack people. With so many computers and not enough Garcias, she would have to come down to Georgia to help find Reid. This was going to be all hands on deck.

Hotch and Morgan caught me walking into the room before turning back to all of the computers. “I’ve already called Garcia. She’ll be flying down here first thing in the morning,” Hotch said to me, though not facing me. I called it, didn’t I? “Everyone should try to get some sleep. There’s nothing we can do until morning when we can look for Reid and get Garcia here.”

“No,” I insisted, “we need to search this house and figure out if there’s any clue as to where he took Reid.”

“Everyone’s exhausted and shaken up. We won’t be able to build a clear profile with whatever we find.”

“I don’t think that’s the right call—”

“But it’s _my_ call,” he raised his voice, turning to me again.

I doubled down. Emotions were high— especially for him and JJ. They were both putting the blame on themselves, and it was stressing them out. JJ was dealing with it by going into panic mode, while Hotch was handling it with anger. He wasn’t going to listen, but I wasn’t going to just sit around or fall asleep, not while Reid was still out there with that psychopath. He needed our help, and we all knew the statistics of kidnapping victims making it past the first few hours. Reid’s life was on borrowed time, and we needed to find him one way or another. So I turned and stormed out of the computer room to start looking through the bedrooms upstairs.

Hotch was right about one thing, though. We all needed rest and to calm down, and even though my eyelids were growing heavy as my adrenaline began to subside, I wasn’t about to give in. I felt like I was going to topple over on the stairs or pass out in the first bedroom as I walked in, but I just tried to focus my vision on one thing and figure out what I could learn about Tobias Hankle and the other personalities he had fighting for dominance in his mind.

I turned on the bedroom light to help me see and to hopefully help me stay awake. I started with the desk, taking a seat at it to help rest my legs for a moment. He had papers stacked neatly everywhere, but they were all old school assignments from, like, fifth grade. The kind of assignments parents would put on the fridge when they were proud of their kid’s achievements. The kind of assignments that Hotch and I put on the fridge when Jack would bring home an A+. Tobias still had them sitting prominently in his room, however. Why? He was in his mid-thirties. Why hadn’t he gotten rid of them or at least stored them away yet?

I rubbed my eyes and opened one of the drawers. There were toys hiding in there. Little green soldier men and knucklebone— things that a kid would stuff in his drawers after his parents would yell at him to pick up his room. I knew because that was where Jack hid his toys when he was too lazy to put them away and I would have to find them and do it for him later so that he wouldn’t lose them. The only two toys Jack took everywhere with him, though, were the red dinosaur and the green Hot Wheels car. Tobias had similar behavior to Jack in that regard. There was only one stuffed animal on his bed, while the others were neatly placed on a shelf, and the toys in the drawers, and the school assignments on the desk. Tobias’s first personality, the submissive one, was a child. He still saw himself as the young, innocent boy that he was when he was in fifth grade or so.

“What are you doing in here?”

I nearly fell out of the chair at the shock of Hotch sneaking up behind me. After I yelped, I saw that it was just him leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed and his face all broody like he was mad at me. He wasn’t wearing his vest anymore, like I was. He was back in his suit jacket and tie, yet he still looked somehow disheveled.

I caught my breath and calmed my racing heart while turning back to the desk. “I’m helping,” I told him, busying my hands with looking through the assignments on the desk.

“I told you that you need to rest.”

“Is Morgan resting? Is Gideon resting? Are you going to rest?”

“Morgan’s already making a pot of coffee…” Hotch admitted.

“Good. I’ll take one.”

“No, you won’t. You need to sleep.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, smiling over at him to prove my point.

He rolled his eyes. “Your eyes are sunken and half open. You’ll fall asleep at that desk before you can find anything of use.”

“Oh, yeah?” I challenged. I grabbed the stack of papers and opened the drawer again to show him what I had found. “Tobias’s submissive personality is a kid. That’s why he called the cops but was so quick to listen to Raphael.”

Hotch came over and took the papers from me to get a proper look for himself. He flicked through each page, licking his fingers every time he wanted to flip to the next one. “So what does this tell us about where he took Reid?”

I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head slowly. It was good information for a profile, but it wasn’t going to tell us anything about where Tobias took Spencer. Tobias’s submissive personality wouldn’t have been the one to make that decision. He might have _known_ a place, but he wouldn’t have recommended it. Wherever he took Reid had to have been somewhere either Raphael or the abuser personality knew about and knew that no one would be able to find. A stack of school papers, some toys in a drawer, neatly placed stuffed animals, and a perfectly clean room weren’t going to give us the answers we absolutely needed.

Hotch crouched beside me and gently put his hand on my arm. “JJ and Emily are taking the couches downstairs. You need to sleep at some point.”

“No, I don’t.” I couldn’t believe he was already back to this. Spencer was out there somewhere, waiting for us to find him. There wasn’t any time to sleep.

“Yes. You do. You’re not weak if you're just taking care of yourself.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Because you’re not acting like it. You keep doing reckless things that impact your safety and health all in the name of this job, Y/N. You’re acting like you need to keep proving yourself. You don’t. You’re human if you need to sleep, take a break, cry, feel things— whatever. You’re just like the rest of us and no one’s going to look down on you for getting some rest when you’ve worn yourself out.”

“He needs me, Hotch.”

“He needs _us_. The best way we can help him is by being on top of our game. You can’t keep going like this. Just take the bed and sleep for a few hours.”

“I don’t want to sleep in this creep’s house.”

“Is that what this is about?”

I nodded. It was part of the reason. While I wanted to help Reid in any way I could as fast as I could, if Hotch was going to send me to bed, he had to know that it wouldn’t be in that house. I would have rather slept on the grass just out front. Anywhere but in that psychopath’s home. It was too unnerving to think about sleeping in one of the beds since all of the couches were taken. It was just too odd.

Hotch grabbed my hand, “Come with me.” He pulled me to my feet and started leading me down stairs and out of the house.

We passed the computer room where Morgan and Gideon were half asleep while trying to find what they could, and JJ and Emily were in the living room, laying down on the couches and talking to each other quietly as they began to wind down for the night. Hotch opened the front door and continued to guide me outside, past the porch, past the grass, and over to the black SUV we had brought.

Hotch let go of my hand so that he could pull the trunk open, then kneel inside so that he could push the backseats down flat to create more space in the trunk. He grabbed the vests that he, Emily, Gideon, and Morgan all peeled off themselves once they knew that there was no threat around the farm, and he threw them up to the front seat. I started pulling all of the velcro straps apart on my vest and pulled it off my body before handing it to Hotch, and he threw it up front with the others.

The trunk was officially cleaned out, but I didn’t understand what for until Hotch told me to climb in. I raised a brow and chuckled. He sat down in the trunk and patted an empty space beside him before telling me to climb in again. My eyes stayed on his as I gave in and crawled in beside him. I turned around to face the open back of the car and sat down, my legs stretched out in front of me. I sighed and let my eyes fall shut just to find a moment of peace and clarity.

It was so quiet and so relaxing. No one would have ever guessed that a place like it would have been home to a psychotic serial killer. But that was how it always went. It was always the person neighbors least expected who always turned out to be the most violent. Tobias was just a boy who didn’t get the help he needed, and so his mental stability spiraled and he became the violent murderer we discovered him to be. Living in seclusion on a farm like that, where the only thing you could hear for miles was the chirping of crickets, it would make anyone go insane after so long. But just spending a night there in the car, with Hotch at my side, it didn’t seem so bad. I couldn’t forget that Reid was out there all alone with Tobias, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was letting him down by giving into the idea of sleep, but I could at least find enough peace in the cool wind passing by the car that I started to grow more tired. We would help Reid in the morning, just as Hotch promised.

“Is this better?” Hotch asked me quietly. I nodded and laid down flat on my back with my eyes shut. I shivered as the wind passed by again. “Are you alright?” he asked, noticing right away. I turned onto my side, now facing Hotch, and pulled my knees up slightly to trap some warmth around my body. He caught on quickly, so he took off his jacket and laid it over me. I instantly felt at home in the strangest of ways, but I didn’t question it because it just felt so nice. “I love you,” he whispered, resting his palm on my thigh.

I put my hand over his, “I love you, too.”


	13. YOUR WORST QUALITIES

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Murder. Kidnapping. Literally everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 15. Morning after part twelve.

In the morning, Hotch opened the trunk to the car and crawled back in beside me to start coaxing me awake. I wasn’t sure of when he had left in the night, or if he stayed to sleep with me but got an early start, and I hadn’t even realized that he closed the trunk while I was asleep so as to ensure that no one disturbed me. He was dressed in a new suit, though, and his hair was combed back, so he had clearly been up for some time. The sun was out, and it seemed like it had been for hours. I couldn’t believe that he let me sleep for that long. He promised that it would only be a few hours and then he’d wake me up and we would get back to work. But it was already late morning and I was just being told that it was time to start working.

I hurried out of the SUV’s trunk and scrambled to my feet. I patted down my hair to get rid of the frizz and adjusted my clothes as well as I could. Hotch crawled back out of the car to tell me what was going on since I clearly had no clue. There was another black SUV parked in front of Tobias Hankle’s house now, along with the Sheriff’s Department. When I asked if the new car was for Garcia, he told me that she was already inside with Morgan, trying to see what they could get off the computer.

Hotch slammed the trunk shut as I stormed back up towards the house. Inside, JJ and Emily were just waking up in the living room, too. They were both sitting upright, but neither of them looked alive enough to have been working for hours on end like Hotch had been. Garcia was sitting in the computer room with Morgan hovering over her shoulder, just like Hotch told me. I walked further into the house and found Gideon sitting at the kitchen table, going through some papers and books he found laying around in the house. He must have had the same thought I did last night that there was something in one of the thousands of papers scattered about where Tobias might have taken Reid.

“What did you guys find?” I heard Hotch ask back down the hall in the computer room.

I retraced my steps back into that room to find Hotch leaning over Garcia’s other shoulder as she started presenting everything she found.

“Well, if I’m being honest, we’re looking at a pretty smart kiddo who got his hands on some very expensive hardware. This setup is absolutely brilliant, but everything on the computers relates to kids shows, online shopping for toys, pictures of cute dogs, and so on. I didn’t find a single hint of evidence that this guy had been watching anything concerning— even the video games he plays are the cutsie ones, not the murder ones you would expect.”

“It would make sense if Tobias’s submissive personality is the one who is tech savvy,” Hotch put the pieces together. I guessed that he had told the team about my suspicions of Tobias’s first personality being a child because everyone nodded like they knew what he was talking about. “But it doesn’t explain how his other personalities can be so violent. Garcia, keep digging. Look for any kind of conflicting searches or odd times when he’s not at his computer. Just keep digging. There has to be something there.”

“There’s not, Hotch,” she insisted. “There’s nothing. Not even the videos he posted to the internet.”

We all furrowed our brows and tilted our heads slightly in confusion. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He would have kept them for Raphael and his third personality. They would have wanted to watch them over and over again to relive their suffering.”

“Well, sugar cakes, I don’t know what to tell you. This guy is completely clean.”

“He must have another computer hiding somewhere. Y/N, take Prentiss with you upstairs to go through all of the bedrooms, see if you can find anything else,” Hotch said to me.

I nodded and headed back to the living room. Emily was on her feet finally, but JJ was still sitting down, staring at the wall opposite her. I wondered if it was really the best idea to keep her at the house and not just send her back to the hotel, but it was Hotch’s choice to keep her on the case. If she wanted to stay and he was letting her, there wasn’t much I could do beyond worry. Emily saw me standing in the doorway, though, and when I made a gesture towards the stairs down the hallway, she caught the hint and joined me.

“Hotch wants us to go through everything upstairs,” I told her on our way up.

“Everything?” she questioned.

“Everything. If we find another computer, we’ve hit the jackpot.”

“Garcia couldn’t find anything on the computers downstairs?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. He has to have everything stored somewhere… It’s just a question of where.”

We started with Tobias’s bedroom, the very same room I had gone into last night to start looking around before Hotch made me go to bed. Emily confirmed my suspicions of Hotch telling the team about what I discovered about Tobias’s submissive personality when she went through the list of things I found in order to find her bearings. I listened as she ran through it all in her own mind while simultaneously walking circles around the room to see if anything would catch my eye suddenly. I walked over to his bookshelf and ran my index finger over all of the different spines while reading through the different titles. He had a lot of what you would expect a middle schooler to have in his bedroom, whether it be from an assignment at school or general interest in reading. What stood out the most, however, was all of the journals on the bottom shelf. They weren’t clearly marked in any way, but as I pulled one out to investigate further, I realized that each of the journals was from a different year of his life. Every single day, every single detail, every little thought he ever had was in those journals.

Emily walked over to the bedside table as a thought occurred to her while in the midst of running through my own evidence with me. She pulled the drawer open and started digging through whatever was in there. I put the journal back where I found it and started circling the room again.

“Hey, look at this,” she told me.

I walked over and looked over her shoulder. She held up a list of Narcotics Anonymous groups in the area. So Mr. Hankle was an addict. It would explain the mental stability and how the different personalities were constantly fighting for power rather than being controlled by the abuser. There was a name, phone number, and an address on the piece of paper— likely a sponsor if Tobias ever ended up taking his NA meeting seriously. The list looked old, though, and Emily seemed to notice it, too. I backed away and scanned the room with my eyes.

“We’ll take any lead we can at this point, though, right?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Something’s always better than nothing. Maybe the man listed on there will know something about how to find Tobias and Spencer.”

“I’ll go visit him later, then.” Emily set the paper down on the table so that we could keep it for evidence when we would leave the room. “I think I’ll take JJ… I think she needs to get out of this house.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Emily knelt down on her knees next to the bed and lifted up the comforter to see if there was anything hiding under the bed. I approached the bedroom wall opposite the bed and started at the art work. The art was just drawings of cars, planes, and trains— similar to Jack’s bedroom wall. If Tobias’s first personality was a kid, then the wallpaper made sense, but there was something off about it. The seam between where the wallpaper started and ended around the room was dirty and worn out, like someone had been constantly touching it and picking at it. I stepped forward and started peeling at the top corner. It came off the wall easily, no pull or stick to it.

“Emily,” I called her attention over. She pushed herself up to her feet and gasped when she saw what I saw. “Honora Patrum Tuum…” I didn’t know what that meant, but Emily was the linguist of our team, and she was standing right there. “Do you recognize it?”

She walked up to my side to get a better look with me. The wall beneath the wallpaper had been covered with the words: Honora Patrum Tuum hundreds of times, all in steady cursive— not like you would see from a kid. Someone else wrote it. Either Raphael or the abuser personality did this. Perhaps the translation would tell us which of the two did it.

Emily handed me something that she found under the bed before pressing her palm to the way. “Honor thy father.”

I looked down at what she had handed me. It was a full pill bottle with Tobias’s name Sharpied onto it. I spun it around to look to look at the label. It was certainly for Tobias Hankle, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was medicine to help him with his mental health and to help control the voices in his head. Since it was full, it made sense that he had flown so far off the handles. Not to mention, the expiration date was almost as old as the NA list we found. If he started going to NA, he probably realized that pills just weren’t for him, so rather than find a way to stop abusing them, he just stopped altogether, which was how Raphael and the abuser took over.

“There’s still no computer,” Emily sighed, stepping away from the wall. “Maybe in the father’s room?”

I shrugged again. Our best bet was the father's room, because if there was nothing in there, then we were screwed. We would have to start from square one. The computer wasn’t downstairs, that much we knew, and after just tearing apart Tobias’s extremely clean room and coming up empty handed there too, there was only one lasat place to look and pray to find answers.

I set the pill bottle on top of the NA list on the bedside table then followed Emily into the father’s room. Tobias and his father’s rooms were polar opposites.While Tobias’s room was perfect and neat in every way, his father’s room was a wreck. It looked like a hoarder threw up in there at least three times. Nothing was organized, papers and books were scattered _everywhere_ , and his bed wasn’t made. If there was a computer or any other clue in that room, it would take forever to look. There was really no time to waste, so we got to it.

Most of the junk lying around was meaningless. There were dozens of old newspapers, food wrappers, old and broken computer keyboards, and so on. What was of interest was the bibles stacked neatly on the bookshelf, but there were torn pages and passages scattered all around, just like we had found at both of the crime scenes. For a second I stopped to think about how that could be, and came to the conclusion that one of Tobias’s personalities must have been picking up these pages and passages from the bedroom and picking the ones that made sense for each sin and took them to the crime scenes. Raphael was the archangel personality, he was most likely to do so .

There was no computer, unfortunately. We probably combed through that entire room twice over the span of four hours, and nothing of use actually turned up. Just as I predicted, we were going to be starting back at square one, which just meant that we were much further from finding Reid than any of us would have cared to admit.

“What now?” Emily asked in defeat.

“Take JJ with you and figure out if that name on the NA list is worth anything,” I recommended.

There was a knock at the door. “Find anything?” Hotch asked us, peeking into the room. 

Emily and I turned to him. “No computer,” I answered, “but Emily has a lead and wants to take JJ to go take a look.”

“Alright.”

“There’s a bunch of journals in Tobias’s room, and even more in here. It might be worth looking through them to see if we can find anything out about his favorite spots around town, see if there’s anywhere that we could check for Spencer.”

“We’ll start going through those with you while Emily and JJ head out, I guess.”

I nodded. Emily and I filed out of the room after Hotch and followed him down the hall. She went back downstairs to go talk to JJ, meanwhile Hotch and I started collecting all of the journals in Tobias’s room. I carried as many as I could and he grabbed the rest before grabbing a few more from the father’s room. We headed downstairs together and dropped everything on the table in the kitchen where Gideon had just given up on his task of looking through the loose papers laying around the house. I guessed that he didn’t find anything of use, and I was just hoping that wouldn’t be the case with these journals.

I sat down next to Gideon and Hotch headed back into the hallway to grab more journals from upstairs, but we were all stopped in our tracks when we heard Morgan yelling Hotch’s name outside like he found something of interest. Hotch turned around and headed for the front door. Gideon and I stood from the table and chased after to see what was going on.

Both Morgan and Hotch had their guns already out and pointed down at a cellar door that was half covered by leaves. Morgan looked to Hotch for a silent signal, and Hotch gave a small nod up. Morga opened the cellar door and took a step in with his weapon raised and his finger on the trigger. Gideon and I watched from the side, my fingers crossed behind my back that we would find Spencer down there alive. I knew that it sounded far fetched and entirely possible, but I just had to hold out hope, right?

“Tobias Hankle! FBI!” Morgan warned, moving further into the cellar, Hotch close on his tail. “Tobias!”

“They won’t find him down there,” Gideon said to me, already turning back to go into the house.

I didn’t budge, though. I stood my ground and watched the cellar to see who would emerge. There was movement again on the ladder in the cellar, and Hotch came up. Morgan followed shortly after, but there was no Tobias and no Spencer. Just empty hands and defeated faces. I asked them what was down there, and Morgan told me that they found Tobias’s dead father, which wasn’t very helpful to our case. Hotch stepped off to the side to call the sheriff and the coroner so that they could clear the scene down below. I sighed and walked back into the house. Gideon was right, and he knew it, telling by the look on his face that said: “I know I’m right, but I wish I wasn’t.”

Morgan and I sat down with him in the kitchen and each picked up a journal. A few minutes later, Hotch came back in to tell us that the sheriff was on his way with the coroner, but we should start looking through the journals for any clues. He sat down next to Morgan, across from me, and we all started skimming. A thought occurred to me as we were all reading that if Spencer were with us, he would’ve read all of the journals in under two hours and had the whole case solved even before that.

* * *

Square one was just as shit as I thought it would be. Tobias and his father had written hundreds of journals, each depicting every hour of every day for _years_. I was taking notes on anything I found slightly interesting, but for the most part, it was all religious ramblings; and for Tobias, there were many entries about his father’s “punishments”, and each of them were described in graphic detail. I couldn’t believe that anyone would do those things to their own children… One would have to be the worst kind of deranged monster to think that any of those “punishments” were alright.

While we were all reading, the coroner was in the cellar, taking a look at the body. We knew that it wasn’t ideal for him to look at the body down there, but we needed answers fast, and we couldn’t afford to wait around for them to drive an hour into the city just to tell us the time of death. It, unfortunately, had to be then and there. Few hours later, the sheriff came into the house with his hat off to tell us what the coroner found before leaving to finish up some more examinations and tests.

Tobias Hankle’s father had been dead for about six months when Morgan and Hotch found him. Something about that time frame struck me as odd and I started sifting through my notes to find what I was looking for. Six months ago, in Tobias’s journal, he went for two weeks without writing anything. And then suddenly it started back up again. Something happened during those two weeks. Tobias’s stressor was his father’s death, and his father abused him, and Raphael always wrote for Tobias when he was the forward personality, and—

“I’ve got it,” Hotch said with a eureka-moment-like tone. He started reading from one of Tobias’s journals, “‘Father is sick. He wants me to put him down, but I say that the bible tells us we shall not kill, and he tells me to honor thy father. I don’t know what to do.’ That was on December 6th. Two months ago. Tobias’s father had already been dead for four months according to what the sheriff just told us.”

The bedrooms, the journals, the behaviors, and the crime scenes all pointed to one thing: Tobias’s abuser personality was keeping him in check. Outside of his delusions, Tobias was actually abused by his father, and now Hotch was claiming that two months ago, Tobias was still writing about his father as if he never left. And maybe that was the case… technically. Tobias’s father _died_ , but lived on as Tobias’s third personality: the abuser. Tobias was the submissive, Raphael was the dominant, and Tobias’s father was the abuser. That was why they were so scared of him— That was why he took over the commentary in the first video. And that was why he could make Tobias do all of those horrible things.

“Garcia!” I called, scrambling to my feet. I nearly tripped over the journals we had laying on the floor as I ran out of the kitchen and across the hall into the computer room. She spun around in her chair, putting down her nail filer before I could catch her using it. “Try logging into the computers as Tobias’s father— Charles Hankle.”

She scrunched her brows, “Didn’t the killings just start, and he’s been dead for six months?”

“I know. I know. I just have a hunch about something. Humor me?”

She shrugged, figuring that there was no harm in trying. “Sure thing, buttercup.”

Originally, we thought that there had to be another computer somewhere in the house that would have all of the videos and concerning evidence on it, because Tobias’s computers didn’t seem to have anything bad on them— but that was because Tobias didn’t like those things. His father did. His father was the psychopath, he was the reason they were killing, and he was the one who would want to watch the videos again. If there wasn’t another computer, it was because they would just log into different accounts.

“Y/N?” Hotch questioned as the three men came into the computer room. “What is it?”

I turned to them, excitement coursing through my veins. “Charles Hankle is the abuser personality. Think about it, Tobias’s room upstairs is in tip-top shape because his father would beat him if anything were out of place— but the Latin on the wall was written by an adult, telling by the handwriting and the use of cursive, and also the fact that Tobias wouldn’t have done that. His father did it. His walls say “Honor thy father” in Latin, and that was Charles’s argument when he wanted Tobias to kill himself, taking all three personalities down with him. When Tobias finally refused, that’s when the stalkings started, and later the killings.”

“I got it,” Garcia cheered quietly. We all changed our focus to the computers, which were all playing different videos of murder, rape, bombings, Church sermons, and so on. “Holy moly.”

“We need to start profiling Charles. He’s likely the one who decided where they took Reid,” Hotch said.

“We’ve got a problem,” the sheriff told us, walking into the room while still pocketing his phone. “I just got a call from the station. A local electronics store was robbed last night. The suspect took one camera, one tripod, couple of SD cards, four computers, and a satellite.”

“Sounds like everything this guy would need to start up his operation again.” Garcia commented, shutting of all of the horrific videos playing on the computers. “Wait—” The screens went entirely black, and I figured that she had just shut them off, but when she seemed shocked, I knew something was wrong. “Oh, my god…” she whispered under her breath as the computers all turned back on remotely and started playing one video.

I gasped as I saw Spencer sitting in front of a camera, tied to a chair, his face all bloodied and beaten. He looked tired and defeated, his head hanging low and his shoulder drooping. His wrists were bound together, his feet tied to the chair beneath him, and his mouth gagged by a cloth. Garcia started typing as fast as she could, knowing that we would want answers just as much as she did.

“Garcia, can you track this?” Hotch asked calmly, but he was keeping his fingers close to his lips, which was a telltale sign that he was silently panicking. 

She shook her head, “He’s streaming this from his home computer. It’s just for us. I won’t be able to find him.”

Spencer raised his head as someone walked into the room with him. Tobias stepped in front of the camera and pulled the gag from Reid’s mouth. “Your friends are watching,” Tobias told Reid, pointing to the camera. Reid made eye contact with the lense, which was virtually us, though he didn’t know it. “See those vermin?” he pointed to something behind the camera. Reid nodded shortly. “Choose one of them to die.” Reid shook his head this time. “Do it,” Tobias violently pinched Reid’s face in his hand. “Do it, boy!”

“That’s Charles,” I whispered, pointing at the screen. “Neither Tobias nor Raphael would lash out like that.”

“I won’t choose who gets _slaughtered_ and have you leave their _remains_ behind like a poacher,” Reid hissed bravely in Charles’s face.

Charles let go of Reid, “Choose one to die or they all die.”

“I’ll… I’ll choose who lives,” Reid compromised. He swallowed hard and looked at the camera again before looking at whatever was behind. “Far… Far right screen…”

Charles grinned, knowing he had won this round. “Marilyn David. 4913 Walnut Creek Road.”

Garcia was typing a mile a minute to pull up information about Marilyn David. Gideon pulled out his phone and started dialing the number Garcia found for Ms. David. “Marilyn David. This is Agent Jason Gideon with the FBI. If there’s a computer open near you, I need you to close it right now— Please, ma’am, just do it. We’ll be sending another agent over to make sure you’re alright.” He hung up as fast as he could without bothering to give her any answers as to what was going on.

“You’ve done your part for now,” Charles said, moving towards the camera. “Now it’s my turn.” And the stream cut out.

“So now what?” the sheriff shrugged. “Wait for a 911 call and hope we get there in time?”

Morgan huffed, spun around on his heels, and stormed out of the room. He hit the wall with a closed fist on his way out of the room, and I chased after him to make sure that he was alright. He kicked one of the wooden chairs in the living room, sending it over onto its side, and then he just kept kicking at it. I ran over to him, grabbed his shoulders, and pulled him away from the chair. He stumbled back before trying to catch his balance and push off of me.

“You can’t do this right now,” I told him, my eyes following him as he went to kick the chair out of the way one last time, then sat down on the couch angrily. “You need to keep a cool head if we’re going to find Spencer.”

His foot was tapping against the wood floor as anxiety coursed through him. “They shouldn’t’ve split up,” he finally admitted. “They knew better… If they knew Hankle was the Unsub, they should have stayed together.”

“No one could have known. This isn’t anyone’s fault, Morgan, just like we told Hotch yesterday. We can’t keep blaming ourselves when it’s not going to help anything.”

“Reid is out there right now, being held against his will and tortured, and you want to talk to me about calming down? How am I supposed to do that when one of us is out there, waiting for our help?!”

“It’s valid to worry,” I told him as I sat down beside him. “We’re all worried, and we’re all doing the best we can to find him. But if we lose our minds, who’s going to help him, huh?”

“We should be out there right now, knocking on every door.”

“That won’t help and you know that.”

“We have to do _something_! We can’t just sit around and wait for something bad to happen—”

“We just got the 911 call,” Hotch informed us from the doorway. “Someone has to stay with Garcia and the journals. There has to be something else of use in them.”

“We’ll stay,” I offered. Morgan looked at me with his jaw practically on the floor. “You’re not thinking clearly enough to go out there,” I whispered to him. “Do you trust me?” He nodded. “We’ll stay here with JJ,” I turned back to Hotch. JJ wasn’t going anywhere either. She needed to get out of the house, and she did with Emily for a bit, but she didn’t need to go to another crime scene quite yet; not after what happened in the barn last night, at least. Hotch nodded and left to go meet Gideon and Emily in the car. “Let’s see if Garcia can get back into Charles’s computer,” I patted Morgan’s knee before pushing myself off the couch. I held my hand out for him and he stared at me for a fleeting moment before taking my offer. I pulled him to his feet. “Reid’s a smart kid. He can handle himself. I promise.”

“I’ll believe you when I see it for myself.”

* * *

Garcia, Morgan, and I were all sitting in the computer room together while she worked on searching the rest of Charles’s computer and we read through more journals. The rest of the team had been gone for hours at the crime scene, and the sun was already down, bringing another day without Reid to an end. Reid’s chances of survival fell significantly as the sun set and the moon rose. We all knew it, JJ most of all as she worked quietly on her own in another room. She was still beating herself up for not being with Reid, and I wished that there was something I could have done to ease her conscience, but I also knew that she just wouldn’t get over it until this was done and we were all home safe.

Around hour four of sitting uncomfortable in that stuffy computer room, Morgan accidentally let out a yawn. He hadn’t slept in days, and even though I was worried about him and I wanted to tell him to get some rest, I knew that he wouldn’t listen. Even if I begged and pleaded, or even decided to drag him onto the couch myself, he’d find a reason to not go to sleep. It wasn’t worth wasting my time to try and argue with him. And even though we had all heard him yawn and we were all reminded of how tired everyone was, he dodged Garcia’s attempt to send him to bed by saying that he was going to make some coffee, and offered us some. Garcia quietly passed on his offer, but I took him up on it before returning my gaze to the journal in my lap.

A few minutes later, Morgan came back and handed me my coffee before silently turning to leave again. When I asked where he was going, he told me that he needed some air and some time alone to think. JJ came in a few minutes after that. She looked upset, and I pieced together that they must have had an argument of some sort in order to shake both of them like that. We didn’t like fighting amongst each other. We all loved one another like family, and we knew that fighting like children was just a waste of time when we could always be spending that energy on solving the cases. But whenever emotions were high and we didn’t get enough sleep, tension always seemed to build in the team. Morgan had been trying to put blame on different people all day because he was so stressed about Spencer, and JJ had been blaming herself anyhow. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of them told me that their argument was about who to blame and why.

JJ sat in Morgan's seat, “I want to watch the newest video.”

Garcia and I turned to her. We hadn’t even watched it yet. We were waiting to hear from the team about the crime scene before watching it— but also because Garcia wasn’t sure if she wanted to watch it yet, and Morgan was still battling with the fact that Reid had to make the choice of who had to live and who had to die. That shouldn’t have had to happen in the first place, but watching the video was just going to be the nail in the coffin for everyone’s already shitty moods. But JJ wanted to see it for some reason, and I deduced that it had to do with whatever she and Morgan talked about.

“If I can’t watch this video and stomach it, then I have no right to be in the field,” JJ admitted.

“It’s not a competition, JJ,” Garcia said.

“I know. I just need to see it. Please.”

Garcia brought up the video, but she didn’t play it yet. She stepped away before she could start it because she knew she didn’t want to watch with us. If JJ wanted to, and I was willing to stay, then that was our choice. But she wasn’t going to stick around, and I couldn’t blame her, honestly.

I pressed the spacebar and the video began. There was a couple sitting on their couch in their home. From what I could tell, the computer was sitting on a table in the corner, just out of their field of view. The man stood and left to get something off camera while the woman got more comfortable on the couch. After a minute or so, the man returned with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. The woman smiled at him as he sat down beside her. Tobias snuck into the living, wearing all black, and covering his head with a hood. He approached the back of the couch and immediately slashed the man’s throat. The woman screamed and tried to get away, but Tobias grabbed her arm and forced her back on the couch.

Headlights from the road outside of Tobias’s home turned towards the room we were sitting in as the team came back from the new crime scene. I could hear Morgan outside asking Hotch about what they found after the car turned off, but my gaze didn’t pull away from the computer screens. Tobias grabbed the female victim by her hair and started dragging her over to the computer in her living room. She sobbed and slapped his hands in an attempt to make him release his grip, but he didn’t let up. He commanded her to stare into the camera. The front door of Tobias’s home opened just as he slit the female victim’s throat in the video.

JJ and I jumped in our seats before turning to the hallway behind us. Hotch and Morgan walked past while discussing the new evidence. Gideon came into the computer room to see what progress we had made over the past five hours or so. There wasn’t much to tell, though, besides the fact that Tobias had posted the video to the internet. To everyone’s disappointment, we hadn’t made much practice since Tobias originally took Reid, and it was clearly starting to annoy everyone.

Gideon asked me to play the video for him after I told him about it, and I obliged. JJ stiffened in her seat as the video started over. She _had_ to know that she didn’t have to watch it again, right? I didn’t understand why she was trying to push herself and challenge everyone, even though we didn’t think any less of her like she only assumed. Watching it a second time wasn’t going to prove anything, and it certainly wasn’t any easier to watch.

As Tobias sliced the male victim’s throat open, the video cut out. Gideon asked what happened and I insisted that I wasn’t sure. I stood and hurried to the living room in search of Gideon’s technical aid. As I started to explain to her that the video turned off half way through Gideon’s examination of it, we heard JJ yell for the rest of the team in a panic. Everyone ran to the computer room. Gideon was sitting in my seat, JJ in hers, and Garcia hurried to her own right in front of the keyboard. I stumbled a few steps in the room as I realized what JJ had called us in for. The video of the murders had cut out because Tobias took control of the computers again, and now he was streaming live footage of Reid again.

“Confess your sins,” Charles said. I knew it was him and not Tobias or Raphael because of the voice. Charles was more baritone and Southern, like how a stereotypical Southern priest would sound.

“I haven’t done anything,” Reid responded calmly. Charles raised his fist into the air before landing a punch of Spener’s jaw. Reid moved with the punch to avoid more damage and pain. Smart kid. “I haven’t done anything!” he yelled more desperately this time. Charles punched him again. “Please… Tobias, help me…”

“He can’t help you. He’s weak.”

Garcia was shaking at the keyboard, trying to find a new way to hack into Tobias’s set up. I believed in her. I knew she could do it, even when she was panicking like we all were. She just needed some more time.

Charles slapped Reid around a few more times before grabbing his long hair and pulling on it to make him sit up straight. “Confess. Your. Sins.”

When Reid refused again, Charles punched him straight in the nose, so hard that it sent Reid and his chair flying backwards. With Reid’s wrists tied together, he couldn’t protect his body from the impact, so he had the wind knocked out of him. He gasped for air desperately, but he couldn’t get enough oxygen in the short breaths that he could manage. He started convulsing on the ground and foaming at the mouth. What had Tobias been doing to him when the camera was off? We were missing something crucial.

“He’s killing him,” Garcia cried, taking her hands off the keyboard after failing to find them again.

Spencer suddenly stopped moving and breathing. Charles grinned widely before stepping out of the room they were in. The video didn’t end, though. We just had to watch as Reid laid… unconscious… or dead? I don’t think any of us were sure. Either way, if he wasn’t dead yet, he would be unless someone helped him soon. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t be able to save him on time while he was like that. If, by some miracle, we happened to find them at that exact moment, by the time we got to wherever they were hiding, it would be too late. Charles wanted us to know that, and we wanted us to watch our friend die.

JJ turned away from the computers and hid her face in her hands, Morgan punched the wall as hard as he could again, Garcia cried harder as Gideon put a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Emily, Hotch, and I just watched in shock. It was going to end soon if it hadn’t already. The son of a bitch had won.

Charles suddenly hurried back into the room and crouched beside Reid. He put his ear up against Reid’s chest to listen for a heartbeat before sitting back up and putting his hands on Reid to start performing CPR. I mumbled to myself the question of what the hell Charles was doing. Why would he want to punish and kill Reid, only to come back moments later to help him? Because it wasn’t Charles… It had to have been Raphael or Tobias. They would have been the only ones who would care enough to help Reid. And then I remembered how Reid begged for Tobias’s help… Tobias had been helping Reid while the camera was off. They had befriended each other. That was why he was trying to resuscitate him.

Reid gasped for air and woke back up. Garcia gasped and sighed with relief. Everyone else released the tension in their shoulders, too— myself included.

“Wait,” Emily said. We all turned our ears to her, but kept watching the stream. “When were the last murders called in by Tobias?”

“9:04,” Hotch answered.

“And when was the video of the murders posted?”

Garcia typed away at the computers for a moment. “9:23.”

“That’s only a nineteen minute difference,” I said. “Garcia how long would it take to upload that video?”

“Two to three minutes, maybe.”

“Let’s call it two,” Morgan said. “That means that, even if you’re going approximately 60 miles per hour, Tobias would have to be within a 19 mile radius of the crime scene.”

“Garcia, pull it up on a map,” Hotch ordered. She pulled up a map of the area, then narrowed it down to the nineteen mile radius. “JJ, call the sheriff and tell him to put roadblocks surrounding that area.”

JJ nodded and ran out of the room to go call the Sheriff's Department.

“Look,” Gideon pointed back to the stream of Spencer.

Tobias was helping Spencer back up into the chair. Reid coughed and wiped the spit around his mouth away with his sleeve. “Thank you, Tobias,” he whispered breathlessly.

“You came back to life…” It wasn’t Tobias’s young, child-like voice that spoke, nor was it Charles’s deep, commanding Southern accent. It was something more proper.

“Raphael…” Reid identified him. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do anything. Someone brought you back from the dead. _Something_ brought you back.”

“It was CPR. Science. Just science, Raphael. Nothing else—”

“How many members are on your field team?”

Excluding Garcia, since she hardly ever came out into the field with us, our team included: Hotch, Gideon, Morgan, JJ, Emily, Reid, and me. Seven of us. Seven archangels— including Raphael— vs the seven angels of death. Raphael was one of the archangels, he would know that we weren’t angels, but his delusion made him believe that we were the seven angels of death, and that was how Reid was brought back to life.

“Tell me who you serve,” Raphael demanded.

“I serve you,” Reid answered, calm again.

“Then choose one to die.”

“What?”

“Your team members. Choose one to die.”

My eyes raced between the entire team to see what they were thinking. They all just looked shocked. None of them seemed to be thinking of ways to help… And neither was I, I supposed. What else were we supposed to do?

“Kill me. I choose me.”

“No. You’ve proven to me that you can’t die. Satan favors you. Choose one of the others. Now.”

“No.”

Raphael pulled out a pistol from his jacket and pointed it at Reid’s forehead. Everyone was tense again. Charles wanted Reid to suffer when he originally tried to kill him, but Raphael was only trying to do one thing: prove that the archangels were better than the angels of death. In his mind, it didn’t matter if he shot Reid, because he would come back to life and they would start over. But from where we stood, we knew that wasn’t the case. If Raphael were to have shot Reid, he’d die immediately.

“Choose one of them.”

“No,” Reid answered again.

Raphael pressed on the trigger, and I jumped in response, but nothing fired from the weapon. My brows furrowed in confusion. Raphael pulled the hammer of the pistol back with his thumb and demanded once again that Reid choose. When Reid refused again, Raphael tried to shoot again, but nothing happened. They were playing Russian Roulette. Reid was one of the smartest people on the planet. He knew nearly everything about the world— but had a proclivity for science and math. Russian Roulette was technically a game of chance, yes, but Reid knew the odds and statistics of the game. He knew how to push his luck. So when Raphael asked again and Reid denied again, I didn’t jump when Raphael pulled the trigger again.

“Alright, fine,” Reid gave in. He found it. “I’ll choose.” He lowered his head in defeat, “I choose… Aaron Hotchner.”

I let out the breath that had been building in my chest and instinctively grabbed Hotch’s hand from his side. Hotch squeezed my hand reassuringly. Why Hotch? Why? They had been through so much together. He could have picked me. We weren’t close. He had no reason to like me— In fact, he actually _disliked_ that I challenged him so often since he was Mr. Know-It-All and always had to be right. He could have picked me, but he chose Hotch… Why…

“He’s a classic narcissistic,” Reid began explaining, “he thinks that he’s better than everyone else, and he treats Y/N better than everyone else on the team, which puts us all in danger. Genesis 23:4— ‘Let him not deceive himself and trust in emptiness, vanity, falseness, and futility, for these shall be his recompense.’ That’s why I choose him.”

Hotch let go of my hand and stormed out of the room. Everyone watched him leave, but I was the only one who chased after him. “Aaron, you can’t take what he said to heart. He’s just doing what he has to do to survive.”

Hotch turned away from the bookshelf in the family room in order to face me. He was holding a bible in his hands, skimming through a few pages. “I don’t care about that,” he insisted to me. “I know that he had to give an answer.”

“You’ll be fine here with all of us. Nothing’s going to happen—”

Hotch looked up from the bible as the rest of the team came in. “I’m _not_ a narcissist.”

“We know, Hotch,” Gideon responded. “He’s not in his right mind—”

“No. Stop. Listen. Alright, everybody, right now, what’s my worst quality?”

We all glanced at each other silently. Did he really want to know? And why? It would just hurt his feelings. Spencer had already hit the nail on the head just a minute ago, why would Hotch be searching for more answers?

When no one answered his question, Hotch spoke up again, “Fine, I’ll start. I have no sense of humor.”

Only sometimes, I thought to myself. But that was because I knew him better than anyone else on the team. He liked to smile around me and we liked to have fun together, but our home life was very different from our work personalities.

Everyone took Hotch’s first words as their chance to speak up about what they disliked about him. JJ said that he was always too bossy and he felt like a bully, Morgan said that he acted like a drill sergeant, Emily said that he never trusted women as much as men— which… good on her for bringing it up.

“Right. So I’m all of those things, but none of you said that I ever put myself before the team, because I don’t. There was a time when Reid and I argued about the definition of classic narcissism, and he knew that I would remember that. Genesis 23:4— ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with you. Give me property, forbear a place among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight.’ He wouldn’t get it wrong unless it was on purpose.”

Reid quoted something about how narcissism was a sin in the eyes of God, knowing that it would blind Raphael and catch Hotch’s attention. The real quote, however, was about cemeteries and how to properly dispose of the dead because they’re impure. Reid was telling us that he was being held in a cemetery. I should have seen it sooner. Earlier, during the first stream, Spencer said something that I should’ve caught. He said that he wouldn’t choose one of the four potential victims Charles had been eyeing to be _slaughtered_ and have their _remains_ left behind. His voice had fluctuated on the words “slaughtered” and “remains”. Originally, I just thought that it was because he was nervous, but I realized that he was trying to tell us before and we didn’t notice.

“Garcia!” I called, running back towards the computer room. “Look for slaughterhouses inside that radius.”

When Emily and I first met with the coroner to examine the first two victims, we all noticed that they had been killed in a way similar to animals in slaughterhouses, and we really thought that it was a dead end because there were so many possibilities, it would have been impossible to narrow it down to one slaughterhouse in Georgia where Tobias had been before. But now we had a smaller area to search, and we had something else: the cemetery. It had to be a family property if there was a cemetery on the farm grounds.

“Found it. Marshall Perish,” Garcia said.

“Tobias said something in his journals about staying clean and keeping away from Marshall,” Morgan said. “That has to be it.”

We all hurried to the cars outside while Garcia sent us the address of the plantation. With six of us going there, and seven of us coming back, we needed two cars. Gideon drove on with JJ and Emily riding with him, and Hotch drove me and Morgan. Hotch led the way, speeding down the dirt road and for the highway. It was dark out, but the headlights and the flashing police lights lit the way.

Hotch was quiet during the drive, and Morgan cleared his throat and shifted in the back seat uncomfortably. He had asked them all to tell him the truth about himself, and they did just to help him prove his point, but now everyone seemed on edge because of it. It isn’t easy to look your friends in the eyes and tell them what their worst qualities are, then move on like nothing happened. I hoped that Hotch knew that he wasn’t really those things all of the time. Just because the work personality he had built for himself painted this image of him being a constant hardass, it didn’t mean that was who he was. I knew that he liked to smile, laugh, joke around, tease, have fun. He liked to hold my hand, kiss me, hold me, tell me how much he loved me every chance he could get. I knew that he was a good dad who would do anything to give Jack the best childhood he could possibly have. He liked to tell me not to give Jack too much attention or gifts, but he liked it even more when I would do it anyhow. It made him happy that I was happy, and that Jack liked me. That was who Hotch really was.

* * *

The plantation was practically abandoned when we arrived. There was a farmhouse on the front of the property where the family lived, but everything beyond that had been neglected by them, including the slaughterhouse out in the woods. We sped up to the decaying building and all jumped out of the cars.

I adjusted my vest slightly by pulling it down from my neck before following Hotch and Morgan inside. Reid wasn’t there. The chair that he had been tied to, the camera that was recording him, and all of the computers Tobias stole were all there, but not Dr. Spencer Reid. I cursed under my breath and lowered my weapon.

Hotch told us that there was no time to waste, that they had to be hiding out in the woods somewhere, and we needed to go looking for them. Morgan and I broke off together to head towards the left, Gideon and Hotch paired up to go towards the middle path, and JJ and Emily went towards the side. The cemetery was just out in front of us, where Hotch and Gideon would likely end up meeting Morgan and I. We decided to start there, to see if they were trying to hide behind the gravestones or the trees that guarded the cemetery.

Suddenly, a gunshot echoed throughout the woods, sending the wild animals nearby into a frenzy. Morgan dashed before I could towards the sound of the gunshot. I was hot on his heels, trying to keep my flashlight up for him so that he wouldn’t trip on something while running. Hotch called Reid’s name from just right of where we were running, and I knew that they were all close to us.

We found the cemetery. Morgan jumped the gate after noticing that Hotch was struggling to get the gate open. Just as the rest of us were about to jump it, too, Hotch kicked the gate open forcefully, and we all filed into the cemetery with our weapons and flashlights raised.

“There they are!” Hotch yelled, aiming his flashlight at the opposite end of the gated area. “Reid!” Hotch hopped over a short gravestone before holstering his weapon. Spencer was crouched over Tobias’s dead body. “Reid,” Hotch repeated with relief. He helped Spencer to his feet. “You okay?”

“I knew you’d understand,” Reid croaked before throwing his arms around Hotch.

Hotch patted Spencer’s back, “Of course I would. You did the smart thing, kid.”

They parted and before anything else could happen, Morgan grabbed Reid’s shoulder and turned him around before engulfing him in a hug. We all watched as they swayed slightly, Morgan holding Reid as closely as he could without breaking him. Hotch bowed his head and silently made his way out of the cemetery and towards the cars. My eyes followed him as JJ went to hug Reid now. I caught Gideon watching me and he stared at me like he was daring me to not go after Hotch, but I couldn’t help myself.

Hotch was leaning against the grill of the car, his arms crossed over his chest, and a frown glued to his face. I walked over to him silently and leaned against the car, too. “You know that I love you, right?” I asked him, both of us staring straight ahead. He hummed a “yes” while nodding slightly. “You’re not a bully.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

I wanted to tell him everything that I loved about him, everything I had thought about in the car, but finding the right words to tell him seemed impossible. There was so much I wanted to say, and there weren’t enough words or ways to go about it. It didn’t matter if he had the toughest skin on planet Earth, he couldn’t actually stand there and tell me that his team telling him that he treats them like shit didn’t bother him. I knew him better than that. But I was failing to find the right words to make it clear to him that he was the best person I had ever met in my life. There was no way I could have ever loved him if he weren’t the amazing, kind, funny, and perfect man I knew. He was a great leader, partner, father, and person overall. The entire team respected him, and they knew that he always meant well when he was being too much of a hard ass. But I knew that wouldn’t ease the feeling of slight betrayal that was grabbing a hold of his heart as we leaned against the car together. 

I reached out to grab one of his hands and uncrossed his arms. There was one way to tell him everything I meant. One way that would stick and actually matter. One thing that would only matter most to him. One way to make him forget about what the team said and just focus on the positive. One thing that I was always dying to tell him during every second of every day.

I grabbed his chin between my fingers like he always did for me when he wanted my attention, “I love you more than anything.”

His eyes softened, his shoulders relaxed, and his frown faded before turning into the slightest of smiles. “I love you, too.”


	14. UPS AND DOWNS OF THE JOB

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: The lightest bit of smut. Dom/sub relationship. Name calling. Teasing. Cursing. Talk about murder. Talk about kidnapping.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 22. Two months after part thirteen.

It was a relief whenever Hotch and I were scheduled to see Jack, and JJ would tell us on that morning at 10AM that we had no cases. Knowing that we had the whole day to just get through work together, then we could go pick up Jack from school and spend some time with him… That was everything. Getting to see his face light up when he’d see us waiting outside of his school, getting to sit down with him to help him with his homework, and then getting to read him a bedtime story to help him fall asleep were all _small_ things that made only seeing him every few days or so worth it. Since I started dating Hotch and met Jack, I felt like I had a new reason to rush home from work, or to be more careful during cases.

After the case the team had just gotten back from, JJ was trying her best to push off some cases because there was still so much to be done around the office. Hotch had paperwork piling on his desk from at least the past ten cases, and Strauss was beginning to ask questions. He was supposed to write up a report about the last case we worked on in Washington, but that was all because of me and Morgan, and both of us felt bad that he practically had to do _our_ work because ended up shooting one of the Unsubs— and Hotch wasn’t even there… 

Paul Mulford and his brother, Johnny Mulford, had been kidnapping people from their incapacitated cars on the side of the highway, then taking them out into the mountains in order to hunt them like animals. Before we managed to catch up to the Mulford brothers, they had killed at least twenty-five victims of either gender, any race, any age, etc. There had been no clear victimology, but the M.O. was clear enough to show that the brothers had been raised to hunt humans, not animals; and that this was a sport for them. When we caught them, Johnny had already been stabbed multiple times and eventually bled out before he could tell us where his brother went. Morgan and I went running through the woods together to see if we could follow Paul’s trail, and sure enough, we found him standing on a hill with his bow aimed at another victim he had been chasing for a few days. When Morgan told Paul to put his weapon down, Paul refused and aimed his weapon again, this time at us. Morgan and I had no other choice but to shoot him before he could shoot us.

Hotch wasn’t there, and he hadn’t even made the call; yet, Strauss was still making him write up the report. Hotch had been stuck at work for hours at night, hardly ever coming home because he just decided to sleep at the office due to how much work he needed to do. After Washington, though, when Morgan and I found out that Hotch was taking on that load of paperwork, too, we decided that we had to step in. I stayed late one night with Hotch since we weren’t supposed to have Jack for another day, and when he accidentally fell asleep on the couch in his office, I snuck in and stole the Mulford case file from the bottom of the pile. I ran out before he could wake up or notice, and I held the file up in victory as I ran over to Morgan in the bullpen. And Hotch never realized once he woke up that I had taken it— that was how much work he had. Besides, I was willing to take the heat from Strauss if it would become a problem, and I was more than fine with Hotch giving me… trouble… for it, if it came down to it.

Morgan and I managed to sneak out of the office and head home for the night before Hotch would notice that we had stuck around to do some work. In the morning, I packed some fresh clothes for Hotch and picked up some breakfast for him. At Quantico, his office blinds were shut and his door was locked. I groaned as I balanced everything in one hand and grabbed my ring of keys where I had a spare to Hotch’s office for… safe keeping… Alright, technically, I wasn’t supposed to have it, but he wasn’t going to tell and neither was I.

Hotch sat up suddenly from the couch and immediately reached out for the papers in front of him to make it look like he had been working this entire time and hadn’t fallen asleep at all. He let out a sigh of relief when he saw that it was just me, and he put the papers back down. I giggled and kissed his cheek as I sat down next to him. As I handed him his coffee and breakfast, he thanked me. He set the coffee down on the table before reaching back to hold my chin between his fingers and pull me in for a kiss. I smiled against his lips, then put the bag of clothes down at our feet before leaning back against the cushions.

“How did you sleep?” I asked.

He leaned back with me, “Okay, I think. I didn’t even realize I had fallen asleep. What time did you get home?”

“About ten,” I lied.

It was more like midnight when Morgan and I called it quits. We were slowly starting to realize how much work Hotch actually had to do compared to the rest of us. It was easy for us to just come into work, get the cases, find the Unsubs, come back to Quantico, do some paperwork, then head back home. But Hotch spent a lot of his time doing the paperwork that the rest of the team technically should have already been doing. Just this one case file alone was going to take the entire day for Morgan and I to complete— _together_. I couldn’t imagine how long it would take Hotch with how much of a neat freak and perfectionist he was. Everything had to be done the right way when it came to Aaron Hotchner— which was probably why he didn’t like it whenever I got bratty with him. Our home life, our relationship, our sex life, and our jobs had to be absolutely perfect for him or it would offset his entire mood, and then everything else would come crashing down like a domino effect. And I hated that he was always under that pressure, and he never shared it with me. Perhaps Hotch and I were all too alike in the way that neither of us liked to be a burden to others, and sometimes the pain we were dealing with was something that just had to be dealt with privately. He probably didn’t tell me about all of the work he had because he didn’t want me to end up taking on some of the load to help him out— which was exactly what happened, anyhow.

“I brought you a change of clothes,” I told him, kicking the bag at our feet. “Fingers crossed that JJ doesn’t pull us into a case today.”

Hotch nodded agreeingly, putting his hand on my knee to help him lean forward again. “One can only hope,” he chuckled while picking up his coffee again to take a sip. His hand stayed on my knee as he got comfortable again. “Thank you for doing this. You didn’t have to.”

I put my hand over his for a moment before he flipped his palm over and intertwined his fingers with mine. “You’re just lucky that I remembered to grab you another tie,” I smirked.

He raised a brow in confusion, so I decided to enlighten him. With my free hand, I dug into the bag of clothes and pulled out the tie I brought for him. The red one he nearly wore to the Super Bowl party. The very same one he used to tie me up. He liked to wear it whenever he was in a _mood_ because he liked to watch me squirm every time he would put it on. It was certainly the last thing he expected of _me_ to bring it for him. But I liked catching him off guard with it when he had always managed to do it to me.

Hotch grabbed the end of the tie after I had wrapped it around my palm to show him what I meant, and he tugged lightly. His lips pressed against mine, but he didn’t pull away immediately like I had anticipated, so I did. He groaned quietly.

“You taste like coffee,” I whispered.

“I could taste like you,” he whispered back.

I bit my bottom lip. “Maybe after work, boss,” I patted his chest and unwrapped the tie from my hand. He was really regretting all of the rules he made for us, I could see it. I turned away like I was going to get up and walk out the door, but Hotch caught the back of my neck before I could get far and made me look at him. I gulped when I recognized the look in his eyes that told me I was on thin ice. “ _Sir_ …”

“Don’t ‘Sir’ me.”

“We’re at work…”

His hand slowly made its way from cradling the back of my neck to holding the front. “Oh, I won’t do anything now.” _Shit._ “Maybe after work,” he leaned in close, “brat.” His lips barely touched mine this time for another light kiss before he let go of my throat and turned back to his work and breakfast. “You have some work to do, don’t you?” he asked me after I hadn't left his office yet.

I cleared my throat and found the courage to stand on my weak legs. I shouldn’t have played with fire, I knew that… but… Wow… And now I was supposed to go work and not think about _that_? He knew what he was doing, and I figured that I should have seen it all ending up like that— or maybe I did, and that was why I had done it? That was more likely, to be perfectly honest. He knew what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing; but I thought that I’d have the upper hand since the rules were his own. Then again, there was the incident on the jet that one time… Maybe the rules weren’t necessarily “rules” but more of “guidelines” that Hotch liked to bend when it suited him.

The office door opened just before I could put my hand on the doorknob. JJ pushed into the room with a welcoming morning smile, not a “I’m sorry to do this, but we have a case” frown. Our good luck for the week was still going strong. She noticed the coffee, breakfast, and change of clothes for Hotch and realized that I had gone to all that trouble for him. She complimented me for doing it since “Hotch didn’t deserve it”, according to her. I laughed politely despite the fact that I could feel Hotch’s eyes staring at me and my knees were still wobbly. Once she told us that there were no cases yet, so there was no reason to gather in the boardroom, we both thanked her, and then I quickly pushed past to get to my desk. 

Morgan was already at his desk, working on some other paperwork he had to do that wasn’t necessarily too important. When I sat down at my desk, he wheeled over while still in his chair with the Mulford files for us to start going through again. I picked up a pen and grabbed half of the stack, but while my eyes were glued to the pages, my mind was wandering. Hotch was sitting up in his office, likely also distracted, and that just made the need worse. No wonder Hotch never got any work done.

“Did you already write the account of finding Johnny Mulford?” Morgan asked, looking up from his work.

I batted my eyes as I shook away my trance. I looked at him in confusion, not having processed what he asked me yet. “Sorry,” I apologized for not paying attention.

“Did you write the report about how we found Johnny Mulford yet?” he asked again.

I shook my head, “No, sorry.”

We had agreed that I would take on the job of writing about how we found the Mulford’s family tow business— which was how they were able to trick their victims into trusting them— and I’d also talk about how we found Johnny Mulford already bleeding out, which was his cause of death. Morgan was going to write about how we found the victims in the woods and how we had no choice but to shoot Paul Mulford. It was us or him, and we didn’t hesitate to protect ourselves and each other. That was part of the job, but Morgan was better at explaining those kinds of things, so he took on the task of writing up that part of the report. It looked like he was already down recounting how we found the victims, and he was moving onto the hard part, which was Paul; and I still hadn’t finished documenting the information about the family business and how they hid the victims’ cars in shipping containers on the property before they could send them to the junkyard.

“Sorry, I’ll get right on that.”

Morgan shook his head and snorted, “Sure you will.” I glared at him and he jabbed my arm with the back of his pen. “I’m only messing around, Greenaway. What’s got your panties in a twist?”

My face fell flat. I picked up a sticky note, wadded it up, and chucked it at his bald head. “Don’t ever talk about my panties again.”

Morgan cringed away from my attack, “Aye, aye, Captain.” He rubbed his head where I hit him, “Did you have to throw it _that_ hard?”

“You literally did it to yourself.”

“It’s been two hours of us just sitting here, writing this entire report out silently, and you have hardly done anything. Should I be worried?” He gasped, “Do I need to give Hotch the ‘don’t hurt my child’ talk? Because I will.”

I chuckled, “Right. Let me know when you’re going to do that so I can remember to hide all of the guns first.”

“So he didn’t upset you?”

“No. Hotch didn’t upset me. Why are you grilling me? What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m hungry and I’m bored. There’s a lot wrong with me.”

“You could say that again,” I laughed.

He grabbed his chest like his heart was aching. “Why do you have to hurt me so?”

“Because you deserve it when you’re being an epic tool.”

“Fair enough.”

“Don’t give him too much of a hard time,” Hotch commented as he walked up to us through the bullpen. Morgan and I both rushed to cover up our work before he could get too close and see that we were working on the Mulford case. When I looked back up, I noticed that Hotch was wearing the new clothes I had brought for him— including the red tie. I shifted in my seat, my thighs rubbing together ever so slightly. Hotch silently noticed, then proceeded to look suspiciously down at the files we used to cover what we were really working on. “Morgan, do you mind if I steal them away for an early lunch?”

Morgan glanced at his watch, “It’s only noon.”

“Like I said, early lunch.”

Honestly, with the work we had, I wasn’t sure how either of us could afford to go to an early lunch. He had all of those cases to review up in his office, and Morgan was right about me not making any headway with my half of the work. I looked around my desk to silently show him just how much work I had sitting around.

“I’ve got a lot of work to do here,” I told him.

“You can spare an hour, right?”

He looked to Morgan for back up, and I looked to Morgan for help getting out of it. I wanted to get this full report done sooner than later because I was supposed to be picking up Jack from school around 3:30. I just didn’t understand why Hotch was being so insistent on this. We hardly ever went out for lunch unless it was something special, and there wasn’t much that was particularly special about that day, besides maybe the tie, of course.

“Go for it,” Morgan gave in. I looked at him with wide eyes that said: “What the fuck?” and he grinned. “They get grumpy when they’re hungry,” he explained.

Hotch thanked Morgan before grabbing my things for me in order to coax me towards the door. I tried to protest, but Hotch was still walking and Morgan was still grinning. I glared at Morgan before throwing my arms up in defeat then chasing after Hotch. He held the door open for me and I walked straight past him and for the elevator. He handed me my purse after somehow beating me to pressing the “down” button.

Hotch picked a nearby restaurant that was considerably nicer than anything I had expected. I figured we would grab sandwiches or maybe even go to a diner like usual, but he picked a place where people normally had important business meetings where they wanted to look sophisticated and rich. It wasn’t the type of place one would go to for just an hour, which was the timeline Hotch gave Morgan before managing to take me away.

We got a table next to the window, the afternoon sun peaking through the trees that were planted on the sidewalk just outside. Hotch pulled out my chair for me before sliding it in under me then taking his seat across from me. I watched him as he silently picked up his menu to start looking for what sounded good to him. I squinted shortly at him, still trying to figure him out before cautiously picking up my own menu to look.

When the waiter came over to take our order, Hotch went first then nodded to me to go. After I gave my order, the waiter left and Hotch turned his phone over on the table to stop thinking about all of the different notifications he was getting from the office still. I put my elbows on the table and propped my chin up on my hand as I continued to stare at him. He was sitting up straight, staring back at me, thinking about something. We challenged each other in silence to see who would break first, but I knew that it wouldn’t be me. He would eventually want to know what I was thinking about, while I had a strong guess as to what it was he was imagining. Even if he had an idea of what I was thinking about, he certainly didn’t know the extent of it. There were so many unspeakable things of what I wanted him to do that had been racing through my mind all morning, and him sitting there with a stern silence wasn’t helping anything.

He reclined to the side, resting his left elbow on the arm of the chair, his thumb gently tracing his bottom lip back and forth. He was purposefully drawing attention to his mouth and fingers. I didn’t move, though. I still wasn’t going to give in.

The waiter returned with our food after a few minutes. He put Hotch’s food down first, and Hotch nodded a “thank you” before I got my food, too. He asked if we needed anything else, but Hotch and I both shook our heads. When Hotch and I were alone again, he picked up his fork and a steak knife before cutting into the filet he ordered. Yeah, it was that kind of a restaurant.

“Well, this is fun,” he said. He finally gave up.

“You’re the one who wanted to come here and haven’t said anything.”

“That’s because I was busy admiring.”

“Is that why you wanted to come here? Privacy?”

He nodded and took a bite. “Also, have you seen the Mulford case sitting around anywhere?” he asked, cutting into his steak again. I raised a faux brow of curiosity in response to his question. I was trying to keep my cool so that he couldn’t profile the truth out of me. “I was just curious because I went to start it today and noticed that it was gone.”

Well, shit. How did he already get through all of those other cases so quickly? What happened after I left his office that suddenly he was caught up enough to notice that the file was gone?

“You’re already starting the Mulford report? What about all those other cases you had sitting on your desk?”

“I pulled them as reference for the Mulford case. I just had to finish up the serial arsonist case file and then I was supposed to start the Mulford one today. The odd thing, though,” he mumbled before taking a bite. He waited to speak as he chewed, his eyes coming back up from his plate to look at me. He continued once his words had spun around in my head for a minute, “The odd thing is that I had it last night before I fell asleep. Now, I asked you what time you left the office, and you lied when you said ten o’clock. How do I know this? Well, I asked Anderson to check in with security, and they said that you and Morgan didn’t leave until about fifteen minutes passed midnight.” He took another bite. “So I had my suspicions, obviously, but it wasn’t until I decided to test you that I realized you and Morgan had taken it.”

“Test me?” I asked carefully, grabbing a french fry from my plate to make it look like I was entirely unfazed.

He nodded and sipped his water. “You never pass up the opportunity to go to lunch with me, but you were adamant about staying to work on whatever it was the two of you covered up on your desk before I could see.” He put his knife and fork down on the edge of his plate. “So, tell me, how’s your progress coming along?”

“Progress?”

I figured that playing dumb was better than flat out admitting anything. If the blame was put on Morgan, Hotch would just tell him to not do it again, but if the blame were put on me, there was a lot more that could happen to me behind closed doors. And while the thought itself was certainly appealing— especially after what Hotch said to me in his office that morning— I wasn’t actively looking to punish myself by continuing to dig myself into the hole I had created.

“You looked a little distracted after leaving my office,” he continued, “so I just want to make sure that you’re getting your work done and aren’t thinking about anything too _hard_.”

I choked on my food as he said it. “Stop it,” I whispered.

He knew he got me, and so he made the next move. “How much did you two do?”

“We thought you had more work than just those two cases. We were just trying to help out since we didn’t have much else to do.”

Hotch smirked.

“What?” I asked him.

“I wasn’t about to start the Mulford case,” he admitted. “I _do_ have a bunch of other cases to work on, but I just happened to notice that it was gone.” I kicked his shin under the table. “How much did you do?” He just wanted to know now; he didn’t want to prove a point or find a reason to use his tie later— he had already done that.

Lying wasn’t going to get me anywhere now. I had practically admitted that we took the Mulford case and were working on it for him. “ _Almost_ half,” I gave in. “Someone’s been a little distracting all morning,” my ankle passed over his timidly.

“I told you after work, didn’t I?”

“But we have Jack,” I whined, knowing that our entire focus would be on spending time with him. I wanted Hotch… I wanted him so badly…

“He has to go to bed eventually.”

“You’re the worst.”

“No. I just enjoy watching you flounder. Besides, it sounds like you have a lot of work to do now.” He reached over the table and took my hand in his, “Seriously, though, thank you. You didn’t have to start that report, and you didn’t have to bring me breakfast and clothes this morning.”

“Of course I did… I love you. I’m here to help you whenever you need it— even if you refuse to ask for it.”

His eyes softened, “I’ll worry about picking up Jack at 3:30 so that you and Morgan can finish the report.”

“No, Hotch,” I shook my head vigorously, “you have so much going—”

“Let me do this since you’ve been doing so much. Please.”

I stared at him and felt his hand squeeze mine in a pleading way. How was I supposed to argue that? I didn’t do nearly as much as Hotch, we both knew it. Bringing him breakfast and clothes and taking on _one_ case report was nowhere near close to what Hotch did for work and for me. Yet, he was insisting on doing _more_. I knew that even if I tried to argue it, he’d insist that I didn’t have to do what I did and so he wanted to step out of his way to do more. As a profiler, it was easy to look at our relationship and determine that we were a classic dominant and submissive couple, obviously. In our line of work, we would always discuss how the dominants would control their submissives, but they would also do anything to protect their submissives. Hotch and I weren’t any different in that respect. He’d be very commanding with me, which I loved, but he always had to go the extra mile for me because that was his role as the dominant. As the submissive, I was supposed to listen, obey, and just… feel loved. That was all he wanted for me. By going out of my way to help him out over the past couple of days, he felt the urge to return the favors ten fold to “prove” his love in some way. So even if I tried to argue against him going to pick up Jack, he’d ultimately slide back into his dominant personality, forcing me into my submissive state, and I’d have no choice but to let him. Either way, he was going to end up picking up Jack from school, and I was going to finish my work at the office with Morgan. And if I listened and obeyed like I was supposed to, our night would be fairly long, just as he promised.

“Fine,” I nodded. He stretched my hand across the table and kissed my knuckles. “But I’m going to bring him some ice cream home to make up for not picking him up since he was looking forward to it.”

Hotch gently released my hand and allowed me to retreat it back onto my lap. “Please don’t spoil him,” he smiled.

“Listen, I already spoil you enough, but he’s my favorite, so you can imagine the kind of pressure I’m under to spoil him even more,” I chuckled.

“He’s going to think that you’re cooler than me.” He picked up his knife and fork again.

“I’ve always been cooler than you.”

He chortled and nodded before taking another bite. I smiled back before grabbing another fry.

* * *

Back at the office, I followed Hotch up to his office, passing by Morgan, who was still working on his half of the report. Hotch closed and locked his office door behind me, the blinds were still still closed, and he turned off the lights. I grabbed his tie and pulled him close and he grabbed my waist to show me the same courtesy. He pushed me up against the wall, trapping me in his arms and against his whole body. I moaned into his mouth and grabbed at his hair. He groaned and slid his knee between my thighs.

“I still have work to do,” he whispered breathlessly, trying to find a reason to not keep going. The rules… We had to remember the rules… But it was so hard. “You’re going to have to wait.”

I moaned into his mouth again, “Please. I need you.”

“We can’t.”

“Sir…”

An animalistic groan left his throat as he forcefully parted himself from me. His chest was rising and falling dramatically as he tried to catch his breath and keep himself away from me. He wanted me, I could see it in his eyes, but he was trying so hard not to fuck me against that wall. I wanted him so bad— no, I _needed_ him. It all started that morning and I couldn’t stop thinking about it since. He had so much more self control than I did, though, and he was going to do anything in his power to not break the one rule he held sacred. While I didn’t want to actively push that boundary with him, he had been practically encouraging my need for him.

“Please,” I whined, pulling at his tie again. I wanted him to pull it off his neck again and wrap it around my wrists before fucking me until I couldn’t stand. “Please, Sir.”

“Just a few more hours,” he pleaded with me. I leaned forward and kissed him again, but he put his hand on my chest and pushed me back against the wall. “I have to go talk to Gideon.” He took steps away from me as quickly as possible, knowing that he would pound me against the wall if he waited even one more second.

I took in a deep breath and collected myself as I stood up right against the wall. “I hate you so much,” I said quietly, fixing my hair.

“I promise I’ll make it up to you later.”

I looked between him and his tie for a moment, and he caught me staring. He smirked and I bit my lip. “Promise?”

He nodded eagerly, “I promise.”

I released my lip from between my teeth and pushed myself off the wall. “Okay.”

I tried my best to walk towards the door without falling over or just jumping right into his arms. I unlocked the door, opened it, and we both walked out. No one in the bullpen looked up at us, which was a sign that we hadn’t been too obvious, at least. We headed for the ramp in front of Gideon’s office so that he could divert into there and I could continue on towards the bullpen, but something caught our attention in Gideon’s office.

Hotch stuck his head in to see what Gideon was doing in a dark room, “You don’t have class today?”

Gideon shook his head, “Only around four this evening.” That was about two hours away.

Hotch stepped into the room, and I looked in to see what was so interesting. “You have Chaplin on film?” Hotch chuckled, impressed.

“Take a seat,” Gideon invited Hotch. “You, too, Y/N,” he smiled at me, catching me before I could run past to let them talk.

“Oh, no,” I insisted, throwing my hands up. “I don’t want to impose, and I should be getting back to work.”

“You can spare a few minutes. Come on.”

Yeah, I could spare a few minutes over an hour and a half ago when Hotch took me out to lunch. Now, Morgan was waiting for me to come back and finish the report with him. While Hotch knew the truth about the report, Gideon didn’t, and he couldn’t know. As far as he was aware, everyone was just sticking around until it was time to go home or they had finished their busy-work. Since neither time had approached for me, Gideon figured I had nothing better to do but to sit down and watch some movies.

I figured that I’d be able to sit down for a few minutes before being able to excuse myself to go work again, so I accepted Gideon’s offer. I walked in and stepped across the view of the projector. Hotch and I grabbed two of the chairs in the room and turned them to face the wall where Gideon was projecting some of Charlie Chaplin’s old movies. He had an old-timey, vintage projector that needed to be watched carefully to make sure that the film wouldn’t burn up or fall apart.

“My great-grandfather worked for one of the first big film companies in Chicago— since they made movies in Illinois at the time, not California. When they closed down, they let me grandpa take a few films home with him.”

Hotch chuckled again, “They let him take them home?”

Gideon laughed, too, “That's the story that’s been passed down, so I think we’ll stick with it.”

“I can’t believe you’ve had these hiding all this time,” I said, gazing in awe upon Charlie Chaplin’s brilliance. “It’s amazing.”

“Have you ever seen Chaplin?” Hotch asked me.

I shook my head. I knew who Chaplin was, but I had never seen anything of his creation. He was a pure genius. Movies like this were never made anymore, and it was such a shame. The creativity that was once so vibrant in these silent films had been slowly erased over time in the industry.

Our attention was pulled away from the screen when Morgan peeked his head into the room to see what we were doing. We looked at each other and he gave a slight nod back towards the bullpen, a silent signal that he was calling me back to work since I had been away for so long. Fair enough, I figured. Morgan probably didn’t expect that Hotch and I would be away for so long, and now I was hiding with him in Gideon’s office just watching old Chaplin movies.

I sighed, throwing my palms onto my knees, “Duty calls, boys.” I pushed myself to my feet.

Hotch and Gideon both gave short waves of goodbye as I walked past the projector and met up with Morgan in the doorway. I led the way down the ramp and into the bullpen. Morgan caught up with me just as I was sitting down at my desk. All of his work seemed to be done and neatly filed away in the case folder. He sat down with me and started talking me through everything he discussed in his half of the report. He described each of the crime scenes and how the victims were found, and how those clues led us to the Mulford family’s tow truck business. Once he wrote all of that out, he moved onto how we chased after Paul Mulford through the woods, found him aiming his weapon at their next target, and when we tried to stop him peacefully, he turned his bow on me, and Morgan and I had no choice to shoot him. The report itself was much more detailed than that, but that was the basic gist of it.

Morgan rolled his chair back over to his desk after showing me everything, “And with that, I am done for the day. It’s been lovely, but I’m ready to go home, put my feet up, crack open a beer, and watch TV for the next five hours.” He grabbed his shoulder bag from under his desk, “I will see you all tomorrow.” Everyone in the bullpen nodded and wished him a great rest of his afternoon and evening since he was so lucky to be going home early.

I hung my head over the work I had to do and tried to focus on just getting it done. Hotch was offering to pick up Jack for me, but Jack had been so excited to have me pick him up and work on his homework with him. He liked the way I taught him math because it didn’t come easily to him, but I somehow made it easy for him. I took the wins where I could get them, and if taking time out of my work to help Jack with his meant that I got a little more time with him and a few new memories to hold onto during cases, I wasn’t going to pass up on those opportunities. I just wanted to get home as soon as possible.

“We’ve got a case!” JJ told us while running into the office. Everyone spun around in their chairs to watch as she walked right by the break room and towards the ramp.

Morgan sighed, having just left Garcia’s office to say goodbye to her, and threw his head back in disappointment. “Come on, J! Let me live a little here!”

“Sorry, bud,” she smiled lightly as she kept storming up the ramp and into Gideon’s office.

Everyone moved onto their feet and slowly started making their way to the boardroom. The Mulford case was still open on my desk like I had hope that I would be able to get back to it in a few minutes, and then I would just go home to be with Hotch and Jack. We all knew that wasn’t going to be the case, though. Whatever case JJ had for us, wherever we were going, whatever we were going to do, we weren’t going to be home in time for dinner; which meant that neither Hotch nor I could pick Jack up now… He was going to be devastated— more so than Hotch and I were. We absolutely hated getting this close to seeing him, only to have the opportunity ripped away from us because of a new case.

“Everyone, this is Detective Cal McGee from the Kansas City Police Department,” JJ introduced us to the man standing in the room with her as we took our seats. I sat between Emily and Morgan, Spencer on Morgan’s other side, Hotch across from me, and Gideon on the couch. “We have sixty-three potential victims missing from his district.”

“Sixty-three?” Hotch inquired. JJ nodded and started handing out the case files. “How have they not been reported missing yet? How did it get this far?”

“Because they’re all homeless,” Detective McGee said, taking a step closer to the table. He set down a stack of mini notebooks and arranged them into neatly placed nine piles of seven.

“So, then, you aren’t actually sure if they are missing,” Hotch corrected. “Homeless people disappear all the time, simply because they don’t have anywhere to go and they don’t know anyone. It’s entirely possible they just moved on from your district.”

McGee shook his head adamantly, “No. I’m sure that they’re _all_ missing. I just can’t seem to convince anyone else of it.”

“What proof do you have?”

McGee started passing out the mini notebooks in front of him to everyone around the table. Gideon was still reclining on the couch with his glasses on and the daily newspaper in his hands. I picked up one of the notebooks and flipped through it. The front page had a nickname for someone, and past that was a journal of who this person was as the detective had seen them and gotten to know them. Their age, their height, their build, the hair color, eye color, weight, posture, any noticeable handicaps, etc. There were pages upon pages about their personality and their history, but then it came to an abrupt end on the seventeenth of this month.

“I’ve tried to talk to people about this, but no one seems to believe me, so they won’t launch an official investigation. I was hoping that you guys could, though.”

“I don’t understand, what are these?” I asked, holding up the notebook in my hand before trading it for another on the table.

“Records,” the detective answered, taking the notebooks that had already been skimmed through and stacking them back in neat piles. “Since most of these people have been neglected by society and the government, there’s no one out there who wants to keep an eye on them, except for me. By keeping records of everyone I see, I can try to hopefully reunite them with someone they know— or, in this case, track that they’ve suddenly gone missing without a trace. I’ve already run all of the different names they have all given me through our computers and everything came up blank. If there happened to be any official records, they had been forgotten and there was nothing about them dying or going missing. For the most part, however, it came up blank. There’s nothing about where these people went.”

“Simply being gone isn’t a federal issue, I’m afraid,” Gideon broke the bad news from the couch. “We need an official invitation into your district by the Chief of Police or Chief of Detectives. Someone higher up has to tell us that they need our help.”

“Um… I— I don’t know… I don’t know if I can do that,” he stuttered nervously, rearranging all of the notebooks in front of him again.

“Unless we’re officially asked, we can’t help you,” Hotch said.

“Hotch,” JJ whispered, “there could be sixty-three victims here…”

She had a point. Sixty-three people just don’t go missing like this. If they weren’t homeless, more people would have been paying attention, too. We were these people’s only hope. There had to be something that he could do, right? He could talk to the district for McGee since he clearly hadn’t made any headway with them. Hotch knew as well as the rest of us what this meant and just how bad this could be. He wasn’t an asshole, he wasn’t just going to let these people continue to stay or go missing. If could help in some way, he was going to try.

“Well, I suppose that you and I could go with the detective and talk to his superiors,” Hotch offered to JJ. “If we get an invitation, we could send for the rest of you,” he addressed the team. We all nodded. It was a good plan. “JJ, be ready in thirty,” he stood up. “Y/N,” he gestured to the door, referencing that he wanted to speak to me privately outside. I pushed myself out of my seat and followed him out of the board room. He kept walking away from me as I tried to stay at his side. “Leave the Mulford report alone for now, I need you to take Jack over to Haley’s house for me.”

I stopped in my tracks for a moment as I processed what he had told me, but he didn’t stop. He wanted me to go to Haley’s house? He wanted me to _meet_ Haley? And under these circumstances? He didn’t want to wait until he could officially introduce us and be the mediator in case claws were to come out? From what I knew, Haley was a wonderful person who loved Hotch very much, but she just couldn’t take him being away for so long anymore, and that was understandable. But she still loved Hotch, as I understood it, and she was still Jack’s mother. It would make sense if she were to feel protective and territorial over her ex-husband and son when it came to me. I was Hotch’s new partner, and things were going really well for us. Like, _really_ well. If she had any hope that they were going to get back together someday, that was squashed when things between her ex and I got serious.

I skipped up a few steps to catch up to Hotch, “You’re not serious—”

“Just pick him up from school and drop him off at her house.”

“Hotch, no— Why can’t Jessica pick him up?”

“She took on another shift at work, apparently. What’s wrong with you?” he raised a brow as he turned into his office.

I stopped in the doorway and watched as Hotch grabbed his go bag. “I just don’t understand why you want _me_ to visit your ex-wife so bad.”

He set his go bag on his desk and stared at me. “This isn’t about Haley,” he shook his head, disappointed that I would think anything otherwise. “If we end up taking this case, you need to be here and ready to get on the jet. You can’t be at home with Jack.” He threw the strap of his bag over his shoulder and walked over to me. “You don’t have to do anything but take him up to the door, explain to Haley that we have a new case out of state, and we’ll call her when we’re done to give her a heads up that we’re going to pick him up. That’s all.” He put a hand on my cheek and caressed it with his thumb.

“Doesn’t that break, like, a thousand custody rules?” I asked.

Hotch never talked to me about what happened with his divorce to Haley. It was a painful time for him, and the memories stung even worse. All I knew was that he had made it as painless as possible for everyone in order to protect both Haley and Jack. He didn’t want to hurt his relationship with either of them, so he signed whatever she wanted. But I didn’t know what the custody rules surrounding their divorce entailed except for the fact that Hotch would tell me when it was our turn to see Jack, and we would drop him off at Jessica’s house if we ever needed to go into work suddenly. I didn’t know if Haley wanted me to even be around her son. I didn’t know if Haley was alright with me just leaving him at her door and then coming back to collect him whenever we felt like.

“When Haley and I got divorced, we knew that this would happen, and so we took into account that there could be times when my custody days would be impeded. We decided that if need be, she could just take him during cases and I would pick him up afterwards and he’d spend the amount of time he was supposed to stay with me afterwards.” He kissed my forehead before shrugging playfully to ease my nerves. “She’ll understand.”

I looked at him and made sure that his touch wouldn’t leave my cheek yet. “What if she doesn’t like me?”

“Does it matter?”

Of course it fucking mattered. I loved Hotch and Jack with every fiber of my being. I wanted to spend every second of my future with them, but living that life included having to know and get along with Haley for the sake of both Jack and Hotch. If she didn’t like me, she could end up making my life hell, and she could possibly take it out on Hotch by not letting us see Jack as often or with such a flexible schedule as he insisted they had. I also didn’t want to hate her because she was Jack’s mother, and he, naturally, loved her. I didn’t want to have to put him in an awkward position growing up where he would be put between this feud Haley and I could potentially have. There was so much at stake with this first meeting, and Hotch was acting like it was just another random day.

“You’re going to be fine,” he reassured me. “Just get back here as soon as you can.” He lifted my chin and pulled me in for a kiss. “I love you.”

“Call me when you land.”

“I’ll try. I’ll call the school and let them know that you’re picking him up.”

“I love you.”

He pulled his hand away from my face and grabbed my hand before we started walking towards the door together. The team was still sitting in the boardroom with Detective McGee, covering all of the different missing persons cases as fast as they could. When we reached the bullpen, Hotch released his grip on my hand before anyone could notice, and we parted ways. He went to go talk with JJ over in the break room and I went to my desk to grab my purse. I caught a quick glance of the back of Hotch’s head before I pushed through the glass doors of the BAU and hurried for the elevator before it could close on me.

Jack’s school was already letting kids out when I pulled up to the building behind the line of other cars against the curb. After I parked the car, I hurried into the school and shyly asked someone where Jack’s grade’s classroom would be. They kindly directed me and I thanked them before heading off. I navigated all of the different hallways until I found the doorway that I had been sent to. There was a teacher standing just outside with a clipboard and a pen. I walked over and she asked me who I was picking up.

“Jack Hotchner,” I answered.

“What’s your name?”

“Y/N Greenaway.”

“Greenaway? Where’s Haley or Jessica?” she asked me. Oh, so she knew them by name… Well…

I dodged her question to get to the point. “My boyfriend called to tell the school that I would be picking him up.”

“Y/N!” Jack exclaimed from the back of the classroom. He came running over to me with his backpack in his hand rather than on his back.

I leaned down and caught him in my arms before resting him on my hip. “What’s up, little man?” I asked rhetorically. I turned back to the teacher. “Are we good to go?”

She nodded warily and crossed mine and Jack’s name off the list of pick ups. “See you tomorrow, Jack,” she smiled. He waved goodbye to her as I took his backpack in my other hand and started carrying him out of the school.

“How was school?” I brushed some dirt off of his forehead that had likely collected during recess.

“Good. Are we going to get ice cream?”

He knew that I always liked to spoil him with ice cream whenever he was at our house, and he must have figured that since I promised to pick him up from school, we were going to head straight to Dairy Queen or Cold Stone. I felt bad for having to burst his bubble because he was so excited to hang out with me and see his dad, but it was better to just rip the bandaid off rather than wait until we got to his mother’s house.

“I’m sorry, little man, your dad and I have to go on another case this afternoon. I have to take you to your mom’s house.”

Jack frowned, “But you promised that we were going to get ice cream.”

“I know, but your dad and I have to go save the world again, so we don’t have time for ice cream.” I set him down in front of the car door and opened it up for him. He climbed inside and I set his backpack on the floor in front of him before reaching in to help him with his buckle. “We’ll get ice cream when we come back and pick you up from your mom’s house, though. How does that sound?”

Jack was still pouting, his arms crossed over his chest and a frown on his face. He looked exactly like Hotch when he was mad, too. I wanted to chuckle, but I knew that it would only make Jack more upset. I crossed my arms and frowned, too, and leaned against the back of the passenger’s side car seat.

“Why the long face, little man?” I asked. He knew that it was always possible that Hotch and I would need to leave randomly and in a hurry. He was used to it. Usually, he didn’t even mind because he knew that we were off saving the world, which ultimately protected him and his mom, too.

“I wanted to stay at your house tonight,” he whined quietly. “You promised.”

My eyes softened as I gave up the joke of mimicking him in order to wipe off some more dirt I found on his chin. He was such a messy kid… “I know, buddy. And I’m _so_ sorry. But you know that when the police need our help, we have to go. If I could, I’d stay at home with you all the time. That’s how much I love you, you know that?” Jack nodded, still forcing a frown on his face. “Come on, Jack,” I begged quietly.

It was already hard enough having to leave him again when we got _so_ close to having more time with him. His puppy dog pouting wasn’t helping anything. I _wanted_ to stay with him, I _wanted_ to take him for ice cream, and I _wanted_ to read him bedtime stories that night, but I had no choice. When duty called, duty called. And, honestly, the best case scenario was that when Hotch and JJ would land in Kansas City, they’d tell us that we can’t get the case, and we’d all be sent home. Maybe this was all for naught and Jack would be staying at our house tonight, anyways. Until then, though, I just needed him to work with me and not make this any harder.

I reached out and “stole his nose” with my fingers. “I love you,” I told him.

He instinctively wiped his nose and smiled behind his hand. “I love you, too.”

I “put his nose back” before pushing myself up from reclining on the seat. He was smiling, he was trying not to giggle, and we were going to be fine. I closed his door and went around the back of the car to get to the driver’s side car door.

When we pulled up to Haley’s house, Jack unbuckled himself, grabbed his bag, and let himself out of the car. I threw my keys in my palm after closing my car door behind me. Jack waited for me on the sidewalk. I held out my hand as I got closer and he took it. We walked together up the sidewalk and to Haley’s front door. I reached over and rang the doorbell. We waited a moment before the lock clicked and Haley opened the door.

“Mommy!” Jack cheered as he let go of my hand and ran to hug her.

Haley smiled and picked him up, “Hey, kiddo.” She looked up at me, “You must be Y/N. Aaron called to tell me you were dropping him off. Thank you for picking him up and bringing him here.”

“It was no really no problem,” I smiled back, fidgeting with the keys in my hands. Jack wriggled out of Haley’s arms and ran into the house to go play or start doing homework— whatever he fancied before his mother would inevitably force him to start his homework, irregardless. “I’m sorry for springing him on you like this.”

“It’s really no problem,” she shook her head, still smiling. “I get it.” She glanced over her shoulder quickly to make sure that Jack was gone. “He was really excited about seeing you guys. It’s been a few weeks.”

“I know…” I whispered, looking at my hands. “There’s not much I can do about it.”

Haley chuckled shortly, “That sounds familiar.”

I brought my eyes back up to meet hers. She was sizing me up, that much was obvious. She wanted to know if I was good for Hotch and their son. She wanted to know the kind of person I was and if she could trust me around Jack. I didn’t blame her. I was a stranger that was now sleeping in her old bed beside her ex-husband and I was now a large part of her son’s life. She wanted to know if I was responsible, if I showed in any way just how much I loved Hotch and Jack. She wanted to know that I would keep them safe.

My phone started ringing as the awkward silence hung in the air. I answered, “Aaron?”

“We got the case,” he told me.

I sighed quietly so that he couldn’t hear it. We weren’t going to get to see Jack for at least another few days. “Okay. I’ll head back to the office. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He hung up the call.

I stuffed my phone back in my pocket. “I have to go,” I told her. She nodded understandingly. I bowed my head and turned to start walking back to the car, but I stopped myself in my tracks. I spun on my heels to face Haley before she could close the front door, “Will you tell him that I’m sorry for me again? I don’t think he quite believes me.”

She paused, her hand still on the inside doorknob, and then she nodded. “He loves you a lot, you know. He tells me all the time.”

I smiled to myself as I continued on my way towards the car after silently acknowledging her statement.

What she said lifted my spirits more than realized, I think. I didn’t like having to leave Jack at all, but to think that he was mad at me, that made it only more painful. For Haley, his mother, to have the bravery to look me in the eye and admit that her son loved me, that was a relief. She didn’t have to be kind to me like that. Hell, I was scared shitless just before meeting her because there were so many reasons for her to hate me and make my life a living hell. But something about how she sized me up— or profiled me, if you will— made her mind up about me. She was okay with me being in Hotch and Jack’s life, and she was okay with Jack loving me as a parent figure. That meant everything to me.


	15. THE CASE IN KANSAS CITY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Talk about murder. Kidnapping.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 22. Right after part fourteen.

Everyone was already on the jet and waiting for me when I stepped on. Gideon, Morgan, Emily, and Reid were all sitting at the four seats around the table, leaving me with one of the nearby single seats or the edge of the couch. I stuffed my go back in the overhead bin and took a seat on the edge of the couch. Morgan handed me an official case file for the sixty-three missing homeless people in Kansas City. I opened the file to take a look. They had transcribed everything Detective McGee gave them for the file, and Garcia had also added whatever she could, despite the fact that there wasn’t much documented in our system. They had been working on the case while I was gone, so they already had an idea of what the profile of the Unsub was.

Morgan ran me through everything they already knew. Our Unsub was what we liked to call a “housecleaner”, which meant that this kind of Unsub viewed himself as a hero who was cleaning the streets of the “filth”, which in this case was the homeless. It made sense that this was their first step in the profile since sixty-three people had gone missing, and the only link in victimology was the fact that they were all homeless. He wasn’t delusional enough to not conceptualize that murder is still bad, but he figured that his murders were excusable because he was helping the world by ridding it of “filth”. Because he has a housecleaner’s superiority complex, he was likely an unpleasant man who left everyone he met with a bad feeling about him, but they weren’t sure why. That makes him a loner, and he blames the world for that. So rather than take on a friend or partner, he likely has someone who is subservient to him to help him with these kidnappings and murders.

According to Detective McGee’s reports, he started noticing the disappearances about a year ago, which meant that the stressor likely happened around that time— no more than three months prior to the disappearances. Since he was a loner and he was a dislikable person, it was fair to assume that the stressor was losing someone who was important to him and loved him no matter who he was, which led us to believe that it was a family member who had passed away. Spencer brought up that the Unsubs likely didn’t have any jobs because of how frequent the disappearances were occurring.

“Sounds like I missed all the fun,” I laughed. They had practically done the whole case on their own while I was gone. All that was left to do was to get onto the ground and find the guy who matched the description.

When we landed in Kansas City, we headed directly to the precinct to meet up with Hotch, JJ, and the detective. Gideon was the first to ask how they managed to convince the Chief of Police to give us the case, and Hotch admitted to us that McGee had gone over their heads with this and come straight to us, so they weren’t exactly inclined to give us the case, but JJ found out that a note that was sent to McGee from the Unsub after he had been rewarded for cleaning up the streets was from Kansas City, Missouri, it became a federal case the second it crossed state lines. 

“This is Chief Wright,” Hotch introduced us to the police chief who was less than happy to see us in his precinct. “We’re going to be working closely with him. This is still his jurisdiction.” Everyone nodded in agreement. “Do you have somewhere for us to set up?” he asked Wright. The police chief nodded. “Good. We’ll set up in there after we give the profile.”

“The profile?” Wright inquired.

“We’ve been working on it all morning,” Reid answered without thinking.

Hotch eyed Spencer with a stern look that said: “Some things are better unspoken.” Hotch turned back to the police chief with a faux friendly smile to throw Wright off. “We’d like to give it as soon as possible.”

Wright nodded warily, “Right… Sure… Let me gather everyone up.” He headed off.

Hotch moved closer to the team as we huddled up to talk with him. “Reid, I want you and Gideon to give the profile. We’re all going to head out afterwards to talk to the locals, see if they know anything about these disappearances. Maybe one of them can identify our Unsub or tell us where to find him. It’ll be dark by the time we get out there, so we’ll all team up. JJ, you’ll go with McGee, I’ll go with Wright, Gideon with Reid, Morgan, Emily, and Y/N will go together. Sound good?”

Everyone nodded again as the entire precinct started to gather up for our profile. We faced them as they got situated in their seats. Gideon and Reid stepped forward and began to tell every detail of the profile that they had told me on the flight. None of the department seemed to have any questions or comments of any use afterwards, so they were dismissed. Wright and McGee came over to ask if the plan was still to go downtown and question people on the streets, and Hotch nodded. Those who lived on the streets were our most likely witnesses, even if they didn’t realize it.

Hotch told everyone to change into warm clothes for the night and gear up. After the team split off, Hotch grabbed my hand and led me towards the break room in the back of the precinct. 

“Hey, how did it go with Haley? I know that you were a little worried.”

I smacked his arm playfully. He knew I was worried this whole time and he was acting like it wasn’t a big deal, and it made me feel stupid about it. “It went fine,” I admitted. “Jack’s mad at us because he wanted to spend the night at our house and he wanted to get ice cream with me, but I tried to tell him that there was nothing we could do.”

“We’ll make it up to him when we get back.”

“That’s what I said, but he kept pouting.” I smiled, “He crossed his arms and frowned like you always do. It was cute.”

“I don’t _frown_.”

“Yes, you do. All the time,” I laughed. “It’s okay, though, ‘cause I get to see you smile everyday, and that's a good enough reason for me to stick around.”

He raised a brow and smirked as he decided to play along, “Was that in question?”

I shook my head, “No. I’d never do that to Jack.”

Hotch finally let out a chuckle. “I see how it is.” I smiled up at him playfully. “You’ll stay with Morgan and Emily tonight, right? No wandering off on your own?”

“I’m not a baby, Hotch. I’ll be fine.”

He squinted, “You have a bad habit of doing things your way. I don’t need this Unsub taking you if he sees the chance.”

I patted his chest, “I’ll be good, big guy. Thanks for being worried, though.”

“Hey,” he caught my attention with his earnest tone. “I love you. A lot.”

He raised his brows shortly to make his words more sincere. I believed him. He never had to tell me more than once to make it stick in my head, but he always wanted to tell me. He was obsessed with saying it whenever he could because he was never sure when it would end up being the last time, considering our field of work. It was like how often I felt the urge to return the favor by telling him or telling Jack every chance I could get. I never knew when the last time I would be able to see Jack would be, so I had to make every second count. 

When everyone was ready and waiting for us outside of the break room, I managed to steal a moment to kiss him and tell him that I love him, too, before we headed out. Each pair, or in my case, _group_ , took their own car since we were all starting on separate sides of downtown and we were going to work our way towards the middle, where we would all meet up to review what we had learned.

Morgan, Emily, and I started on the South side of downtown. where there were more homeless camps than stragglers and prostitutes. We found a few communities building shelters under bridges and outside of abandoned builds, and we asked each and every person we came across if they recognized our Unsub’s profile or if they had seen anything suspicious at all. While they all insisted that there was nothing out of the ordinary, the worrisome part was that they all said that they hadn’t heard about any disappearances. They knew of people who had moved away, but not gone missing. Those of them who told us that they knew of people who moved away were given a list of names by Emily to see if they could identify any of the victims, but to no such luck. It was like these victims didn’t even exist between the missing files and the fact that no one in the area knew of them.

While walking North, we came across an injured and alone woman, pushing a cart full of her belongings along in front of her as she limped. We were asking anybody and everybody for their help, this woman was simply no exception. Morgan approached her with a kind smile and she smiled back at him. He had an inviting, homely face that when lit up with a smile, it was contagious to everyone else.

“How are you doing this fine evening, ma’am?” he asked her as she stopped pushing her cart.

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“We’re with the FBI and we’re investigating some disappearances that have been happening in this area. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Go for it, handsome.”

Emily and I both smiled at the ground. Morgan was just that kind of guy. He was attractive, smart, funny, and embarrassingly kind. He had this playboy type attitude that he liked to flaunt around a lot, but underneath all of that was a man who just wanted to do right by everyone he ever met. This woman looked so sad and alone, yet she took an immediate liking to Morgan— not in a creepy way, but in a way that reminded me of how a grandmother would treat their grandson; and Morgan was more than willing to oblige this woman by playing along.

“What’s your name darling?”

“Mona.”

“Mona,” he smiled. “I love that name. It suits you. Well, Ms. Mona, have you seen anyone suspicious around here recently? Maybe some unfamiliar, out of place faces?”

Mona shook her head, “There’s unfamiliar faces everywhere on the streets. You see a lot of the same people all the time, but people come and go as their life takes turns going up and down.”

“Have you noticed that anyone you recognized a lot is suddenly gone?”

Mona shook her head again. “Like I said, people come and go as they please. One day they might be under the bridges, the next they’ll be working in some restaurant. Life happens.”

“Alright, well, thank you for your help. Can I maybe take you somewhere? Like a shelter, perhaps?”

Mona scoffed and scrunched up her nose in disgust, “Have you ever seen one of them shelters? I have better luck on the street than in there.”

“Okay, okay,” he pulled his hands out of his coat pockets and threw them up in surrender, “You just be careful out there, Mona. We need more beautiful faces like you out in the world.”

Mona blushed and hid her face in the collar of her shirt. She thanked him for his kind words before pushing her cart off again and continuing on her way through the streets at night. We watched her walk on and I hoped to myself that she would be alright and she wouldn’t end up as one of the next victims. She was a good woman— a kind woman. She didn’t look like she could hurt a fly. We needed more people like her in the world.

Emily chuckled. “You’re a good guy,” she complimented Morgan.

It boosted his ego tenfold and he smiled over at us, his playboy act returning just for show. “Oh, I know.”

“I think you’re just an asshole who has a thing for older women,” I bit back a laugh.

Morgan’s smile brightened at my playful jab. “Says the one dating _our boss_.”

“Ooh,” Emily sighed, “burn…”

“Is that for me calling you a tool earlier?” I interrogated, walking past to keep heading North.

He nodded, “It sure is.”

Both of them caught up with me and we continued on a few more blocks before we ended up finding Hotch and Wright walking towards us from the North. We regrouped with them as we waited for JJ, McGee, Gideon, and Reid to find us on their paths from the West and East. Morgan asked if Hotch and Wright found anything of use, and they shook their heads. No one had seen anything out of the ordinary and no one even knew that these people were missing. Emily admitted that we had the same luck.

“We saw JJ and McGee about a block back and they said the same thing,” Hotch told us. “It’s just weird. You’d think that if the Unsub were out here, he’d stick out like a sore thumb because of his superiority complex, but all of these people seem… quiet and humble. Most of them even seem extroverted once you start talking with them.”

“And our Unsub is _definitely_ an introvert?” I checked.

Hotch shrugged.

“You were adamant on our guy being an introvert, but being extremely memorable… yet no one seems to have any idea of who we’re talking about,” Wright said with an accusatory tone towards Hotch.

“So, then, riddle me this, Chief Wright, what do you think happened to those sixty-three missing people?”

“I still don’t think anything happened to them, Agent Hotchner. I think that this is all a waste of my time, your time, and the people’s tax dollars.”

“Ah, right. You think that they all just got jobs and houses. Maybe they found rainbows and unicorns as well.”

“Hotch,” I hissed a warning. Their tones and conversation were incredibly rude. It wasn’t going to help anything if they were just going to keep fighting amongst each other.

Emily changed the topic first, “What we should really be asking ourselves here is how did the Unsub get sixty-three or more street smart people off the streets without being seen?”

“It would need to be someone trustworthy, under the radar. He’s here all the time, but not enough for people to know him by name or to know enough about him to think that he’s an unlikable person.”

“Then it’s definitely not someone from the streets,” Morgan added. “Someone who would go undetected by bystanders and the street community alike.” He looked down the road, towards the direction where Mona had started walking off. “Someone like… Captain Wright, does your Social Services Department patrol around at night?”

Wright furrowed his brows and shook his head, “No, they have to be called, and then—”

Morgan jumped onto his toes and started running back towards Mona’s direction. We all turned to see what he was doing while Hotch ran after him. Morgan had spotted Mona at the end of the road, just in front of an alleyway, walking with a man who had driven up in a Social Serves van. The driver was taking Mona’s cart from her calmly and helped her put it into the back of her van. It looked fairly innocent, but with what Wright had just disclosed about Social Services not being out that time of night, we realized that something was wrong. Well started chasing after Morgan and Hotch.

“Mona!” Morgan called out desperately. “Mona, wait! Do not get in that van!” He slowed his pace down as he approached her and the driver of the van. “What are you doing?” he asked curiously, putting a hand on Mona’s shoulder.

“He's gonna drive me to the park,” she answered.

The driver was already getting back in the car and trying to start the engine. Morgan walked over to the window. The rest of us slowed down now as we caught up to them. Morgan leaned against the car, peeking his head in through the window, “Hey, what’s going on, my man?”

“I should go,” the driver said nervously, turning the engine over and it started to rumble.

“Sir, do you have a city employee I.D.?” Hotch asked the driver.

“Look, I really don’t have time for this.”

“Yes, you do. I.D. Now, please,” he demanded with a gruff tone that I knew all too well.

The driver hesitated for a moment, his eyes still on the steering wheel that he had a tight grip on. Morgan kept his hands on the car and his head in the window— a tactic to try to intimidate the man. I looked at the banner on the side of the van, and realized that it was entirely fake. It didn’t look at all real if you knew what the real thing looked like. But to anyone on the streets, like Mona, it probably looked legit. Next thing I knew, the banner was speeding out of my field of view as the driver stepped on the gas. The car sped forward with Morgan still hanging on to make sure that he wouldn’t get away. I called out Morgan’s name as we all ran after the car. The driver was racing down the alleyway towards a dead end, which he soon realized, but with Morgan fighting with him for control of the van, he was unable to stop in time before they collided with the wall. 

“Morgan!” I cried his name out again as I grabbed his jacket and pulled him out of the window. He jumped onto his feet and thanked me before yanking the front car door open and pulled the driver out. “Don’t do that ever again,” I scolded Morgan while he pushed the driver up against the side of the van and arrested him. 

Morgan recited the driver’s rights as he slapped the handcuffs on him. Hotch called Gideon and JJ to let them know that their groups needed to meet us back at the precinct as soon as possible. The car that Emily, Morgan, and I brought was the closest. Hotch hopped in the car with us and the suspect since he wanted to lead the interrogation when we would arrive at the precinct. I sat up front with Morgan, as usual, while Emily and Hotch sat on either side of the handcuffed suspect.

I watched the suspect through the mirrors on the outside of the cars and the rearview one on the ceiling between Morgan and I. He didn’t look at all like a killer. He looked scared, but not innocent. We had caught him trying to take someone while posing as a city official, so he knew that he was neck deep in trouble, but he wasn’t our Unsub. Earlier, however, the team had mentioned that our Unsub could possibly have a subservient partner who was helping him, and that certainly passed through my mind as a possibility a few times. Hotch was likely going to proceed with the investigation with such an accusation to see if we were right, in turn also proving a point to Chief Wright. 

At the station, JJ and McGee were already waiting for us since they had been the closest. Morgan and Emily took the suspect into the interrogation room, meanwhile Hotch, JJ, McGee, and I stayed in the mirror room just outside of it to talk about how we were going to proceed. McGee asked us if we thought that this was our Unsub, but Hotch denied the claim, and as I suspected, he assumed that this man was the subservient Unsub who was helping the dominant by kidnapping the victims. McGee asked what that meant for our investigation— and specifically this interrogation, and we told him that this guy was going to tell us exactly where to find our real Unsub, if he really was who we thought he was. It was entirely possible that this guy was just some other random creep who had been taking people off the streets, but that was a whole other can of worms to open if it got to that point. 

“Detective, I want you to go in with me,” Hotch said to McGee.

“Wha— What… Me? Are you sure?”

Hotch nodded as a response to him just as Morgan and Emily came out of the interrogation room. “Morgan, call Garcia and see if we can find anything on this guy.” Morgan took his orders and headed out to go call her. “Y/N, if this guy ends up not responding to the good cop, bad cop routine, be ready to go in.” I nodded. “McGee, when we go in there, let me do all the talking. I’m going to ignore you— I won’t even look at you. I need to show this guy that I share the same alpha, dominant personality as the other Unsub in order to get him to tell us anything.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Y/N’s going to go in. If he doesn’t respond to a male dominant type, then he’s likely scared of the opposite. A woman. It doesn’t matter if they’re stern with him, because their physique and demeanor will throw him off. We’ll worry about one thing at a time, though.”

The door to the room opened up again and Morgan stepped back in. “Garcia couldn’t find much on this guy. His driver’s license is legit, so his name is Steven Foster. But there are no employment records, tax records, no credit cards, no bank accounts, nothing. This guy’s practically a ghost.”

“That’s likely the point,” Hotch added. “The dominant probably told him that the best way to keep both of them safe is to leave no paper trail.”

“Wait,” McGee cut in. “If this guy is so devoted to the other Unsub, then why does he look so scared?”

“He’s the only one who knows what the Unsub is truly capable of,” Emily responded. “He’s the only one alive who can tell us who the Unsub is and what horrible atrocities he has committed. He knows better than anyone what the dominant could do if he found out that he was caught by the police.”

“We can use that to our advantage,” Hotch explained.

The door opened again and Wright, Reid, Gideon, and JJ all walked in. Gideon and Hotch nodded knowingly to each other. Hotch took that as his signal and waved McGee over with him towards the other door that led into the interrogation room. The second Hotch stepped into the room, Steven leapt out of his chair and tried to _power_ _pose_ on Hotch, of all people.

“It’s about damn time!” Steven exclaimed with faux anger that was trying to cover up his anxiety. “What am I doing here, anyways? I didn’t do anything! I mean, what’s the charges? Hm? Do you even have any? What did I even do? Offer to help an old lady get to the park? Is that even illegal? No, I don’t think so!” He chuckled to himself, “I see, you’re going to try to charge me with the collision, even though it was the other cop’s fault! The black guy! You know!”

His incessant yelling wasn’t at all intimidating. In fact, it only showed just how fragile he was and how quick he was to unravel in front of Hotch’s glare and spine-chilling silence. I recognized Steven’s attempts to find a talking point for Hotch to respond to because it was what I would have done if Hotch was like that towards me. Even if everyone else didn’t realize it, this was more than just putting on an alpha personality for show and for the interrogation; this was Hotch’s exact dominant personality. Every time I was in Steven’s shoes, I was practically bouncing off the walls with anxiety because Hotch _always_ got quiet when he slid into his dominant role. He liked to wait and see me squirm and dig myself into holes that I couldn’t climb out of because he would ultimately use those against me later. That was exactly what he was doing with Steven… and I pitied him for what would come next.

“He jumped into _my_ van! He crashed the car, not me! I didn’t do anything! There were witnesses! They’ll testify!”

“Sit. Down,” Hotch commanded sternly.

Steven did as he was told immediately. God, it was so ironic to me that the rest of the team watching had no idea just how common this was for Hotch, but I knew… I knew exactly just how terrified Steven was of possibly crossing Hotch again now. Steven’s obedience also meant that Hotch was going to get through. He didn’t need me to go in, and he didn’t even need McGee there anymore to prove his dominance in the room. Hotch had already won and Steven didn’t even know it yet.

“I’ve been standing on the other side of that glass, thinking about what to do with you, Steven,” Hotch said as he sat down across from Steven. A shiver ran down my spine in response to Hotch’s low volume. “And this morning, I decided that I’m going to save your life. You’re going to tell me where my killer is. You’re going to give me an address. And you’re going to tell me how to get inside without raising an alarm. You’re going to draw me a map, if I need one. You will do whatever it takes to help me.” Steven started rocking back and forth as panic set in again. “You’re going to do all of this because he has never been nice to you. He is going to hurt you if we don’t find him and we let you go while he is still out there. He’s going to kill you unless you help us lock him away. Do you understand? He doesn’t care about you. He told you to not get caught by the authorities, and you disobeyed him, which means that there will be severe punishment. You don’t want that, do you, Steven, so don’t give him the satisfaction. Tell me where he is.”

Steven shook his head, “I can’t.”

“You can, and you will.”

“No… You don’t understand… _I can’t_. My family has always worked for his family. It’s all I know…” He choked back a worried sob. “His father died last year, leaving him everything— the money, the place, the—” he stopped himself short before he could admit more about their operation. “He’s the last one… He’s going to hurt me so bad…”

“Not if you tell us how we can put him away.”

Steven looked down at his fidgeting hands in his lap. He gulped while thinking long and hard about what he was going to do. Like I said, Hotch had already won after he made his first command. It was only a matter of time before Steven would give in. With the truth of Steven’s possible punishment staring him in the face, he had no choice but to help us or go back to his partner and be slaughtered like the other victims likely had been.

“Holcombe,” he whispered. “His name is… Charles… Holcombe…”

Morgan was already on his phone, calling Garcia for information on the name we were given, Emily went to call the SWAT team for back up, JJ went to go handle the press conference that would come shortly after the arrest, but Gideon, Reid, and I all stayed to watch the rest of the interrogation.

“He owns the old meatpacking plant.”

Reid left to go tell Morgan that detail and to find out where the meatpacking plant was located. It was just me and Gideon now.

“He has her there.”

“Who does he have?” Hotch interrogated.

He shook his head again, “I don’t know her name. I picked her up yesterday. The sun’s coming up… If she isn’t dead yet, she will be soon. The kill room is on the third floor in the East wing. You can enter through the first floor, North side door.”

Hotch pushed his chair out and stormed out of the interrogation room with McGee following close behind. Gideon and I left the mirror room just behind them and we headed towards the boardroom where our team had set up shop. Morgan and Reid already had their vests on, and Morgan was just getting off the phone with Garcia when she gave him the address we needed to find Charles Holcombe.

Morgan tossed my vest at me and I started strapping it to my torso. I tied my hair back out of my face as the entire team— Hotch, Gideon, Morgan, Emily, Reid, JJ, me, Wright, and McGee— all headed outside for the black SUVs just out in front of the precinct. All ten of us fit into two separate cars. Hotch drove one with McGee, Wright, and Gideon, Morgan drove the other with me, Emily, Reid, and JJ. We raced down the highway with the lights and sirens on. The meatpacking plant was only about ten minutes away, but with traffic moving out of our way and Morgan speeding over ninety miles per hour, we would make it in half that.

When we arrived at the building, Morgan and Hotch parked the cars on the North side of the building, since that was how Steven told us we would get into the building. The SWAT team pulled up just behind us, jumping out of their truck before it could even come to a full stop. Hotch told them to lead the way towards the third floor in the East wing. He opened the front door for them, using a crowbar in order to pry it open. They all filed into the building with their much larger weapons, compared to ours. As I ran in behind Morgan and Hotch, I nearly tripped when I trampled over a couple of pairs of shoes lined up in the hallway. I raised a brow as I caught my footing. It looked like the shoes were almost leading the way to the door… but there were so many of them… way more than sixty-three pairs… and there were kids sized ones, too… I tried to ignore the thought as I stepped around them and followed the team further into the building. We took a few interesting turns on our route to a staircase which held us to the third floor, and from there, we continued heading East.

When we found traces of blood on the floor, the SWAT team slowed down to approach each corner with caution. On the walls, I started to notice that he had painted labels— or directions, if you will— on each corner to help him keep track of where he was and where he was going, which only made it easier for us to find him, because all we had to do was follow the corners that read “KILL ROOM”. Then, when we heard movement and talking down the hall, the leader of the SWAT team called us all forward so that we could proceed with the negotiations and arrest. Our entire time moved up and waited for Hotch’s signal to run around the corner with our weapons raised. When we did, we saw Holcombe at the end of the hall, wearing a full hazmat suit, turning a stretcher into a nearby room labeled as the “KILL ROOM” with big, red letters, presumably done in blood.

“Charles Holcombe!” Hotch called out, taking careful steps forward. “FBI!”

Holcombe looked up from the girl on the stretcher in front of him to Hotch and the rest of the team who was approaching him with hostility. “No!” he cried when he realized that he had finally been caught. He let go of the stretcher and picked up a large machete knife that had been laying beside the woman. He raised it like he was going to slash it down on her neck.

“Don’t do it!” I warned him, still approaching behind Hotch and Morgan.

“Charles Holcombe, you’re under arrest for the murder of sixty-three people,” McGee quivered as he spoke with courage.

“Just let me do my job!” Holcombe yelled again.

When he started lowering his hand and knife back down towards his next victim, Hotch tried warning him again to not do anything stupid, but he couldn’t take the chance that this guy would kill the woman, so both him and Morgan started firing since they had the cleanest shots. Holcombe fell away from the stretcher, dropping the knife, and landing on his back on the floor.

I pushed past Hotch and Morgan once they were done firing, and I ran over to the woman to make sure that she was alright. Hotch followed me over, Morgan and Reid went to check on Holcombe, and Emily pulled out her phone to call an ambulance. The woman looked up at me with tears in her eyes and blood pulsing out of multiple different wounds around her body. I cooed her quietly as Hotch and I both started working on releasing her hands from the restraints keeping her on the stretcher.

“His face…” she cried.

Hotch thought she said, “ _My_ face,” so he responded with, “You’ve got some cuts, but you’re going to be okay.”

She shook her head, “No, _his_ face. I want to see _his_ face. Please.”

Hotch froze for a moment before telling Morgan to pull the mask off of Holcombe’s face for the woman to see. Hotch and I carefully propped her head up as Morgan did as he was told. When Holcombe’s face was revealed, she started laughing hysterically to herself, likely from the shock.

“I won,” she laughed with relief. “I won…”

I eyed Hotch through my eyelashes so as to not make it obvious that we were sharing a worried glance over this woman. He decided to take the initiative to keep talking to her to calm her down. “You’re going to be okay. There’s an ambulance outside. You’re safe. Just try not to move until the EMTs come in.”

She stopped laughing slowly and took in a painful, wheezing breath, “Can you have someone check on my baby, please? I left her with my mom for the night, but I didn’t get home on time… I just want to make sure my baby’s alright…”

“What’s your name?” I asked her. If I had her name, I could call Garcia and get an address for her mother.

“Maggie. Maggie Flores.”

“I’ll find your daughter, Maggie. She’ll meet us at the hospital, okay?”

She nodded and thanked me. I gave Hotch another look before I stepped back, grabbed my phone from my pocket, and dialed Garcia’s number at the office. I asked her to look for a Maggie Flores in Kansas City, and I needed an address for her mother. Garcia was on it faster than the speed of light. She gave me an address and a phone number to call Sarah Flores, Maggie’s mother. I hung up with Garcia and called Mrs. Flores at her home address. She picked up after the second ring as though she had been sitting next to the phone, waiting for her daughter to call. I told her my name and that I was with the FBI, and that we had just found her daughter. I told her that we were going to be taking her to the hospital, but she looked alright besides a few scrapes and bruises. Mrs. Flores, understandably, started crying on the other end of the call. I asked the EMTs running past me which hospital they would be taking her to, and I relayed that information to Mrs. Flores on the phone. She told me that she would grab her granddaughter and they would hurry to meet us there.

When I got off of the phone with Mrs. Flores, the EMTs had already put Maggie on one of their stretchers and they started pushing her towards the exit. Hotch still stood where I left him, the rest of the team gathering up with him. As I approached, I heard Wright apologizing to both McGee and Hotch for not believing them. Without McGee, those sixty-three— or more people— wouldn’t have found justice, and that mother would have been dead. McGee did the right thing by coming to us with the case.

JJ told Hotch that she was going to head back to the station with Gideon and Reid to prep for the press conference which would conclude this case, and then they would start packing up so that we could go home. I started walking backwards, toe to heel, as I headed for the stairs where they were taking Maggie. Hotch asked where I was going, and I told him that I was going to ride with Maggie to the hospital to make sure that she was alright. I spun around on my heel to start walking forward. I called back to him that he could pick me up from the hospital whenever we were ready to head back to Virginia. I knew that he was probably less than pleased with me going off on my own, but like he said himself… I had a tendency of doing things my way.

Maggie thanked me for keeping her company in the ambulance as I sat down on the bench beside her and took her hand. I comforted her and told her that her family would be meeting us at the hospital. She was going to be alright.

When we arrived at the hospital, they took her to a room and locked me out while they made sure that she was okay. I sat just outside of the room, bouncing my knee as I waited for something to happen. A few minutes later, I found that an older woman and a toddler were running towards me. I stood from my seat in the hallway to greet them. Mrs. Flores looked visibly distraught while trying to see into her daughter’s hospital room, while the little girl looked so confused about why she was there. After the nurse came out of the room to tell us about Maggie’s status, Mrs. Flores took her granddaughter into the room and I stayed in the hallway to give them privacy.

I sat back down and continued to bounce my knee. All there was left to do now was wait for Hotch to pick me up when the team was ready to head home. I wasn’t entirely sure why I decided to quickly go with Maggie to the hospital. I think I attributed it towards how she asked us to check on her daughter before she even asked about herself. I wanted to find her daughter for her, and I wanted to see them reunite. I could only hope that if I were to ever be in Maggie’s position, someone would show me the same courtesies… Maybe that was why I went… 

Hotch called to tell me that he was waiting in the car outside. I told him that I would be right out, but before I went downstairs, I went back into Maggie’s room to tell her goodbye. She was curled up on her hospital bed with her daughter in her arms, both of them content and half asleep. I whispered to tell her that I needed to return to Virginia, but that I was happy that she was safe. She thanked me again for saving her life and reuniting her with her daughter. All I could do was smile and nod before quietly taking my leave. I didn’t know what else there was to say to her when I didn’t even fully understand it all myself.

In the car, Hotch asked if I was alright. I stared at his cheek for a moment while he kept his focus on the road, then I hummed a “yes” and took one of his hands from the steering wheel and intertwined my fingers with his. My mind was still lost in thought, thinking about how Maggie was holding her daughter close and how I wanted nothing more than to hold Hotch and Jack like that forever. My heart was pounding in my chest, too, and I wasn’t sure if it was left over anxiety from the events at the meatpacking plant, or if it was from Hotch’s electric touch, or the desperation I felt for getting back home to see Jack. We had only been away for a day, but that was a day longer than I wanted in the first place, and I was sure that Hotch felt the same way.

Hotch’s hand untangled itself from mine before he put his palm against my cheek. I tucked into his touch and sighed lightly as he brought me back down to Earth. “We’re going to see him soon,” he reassured me.

He knew that things weren’t okay and that I just wanted to get home to be with him and Jack more than anything else in the world. Jack wasn’t even my own, and yet my heart ached every time I was away from him… It was the oddest feeling. I knew that he wasn’t mine, and I knew that he never would be. I knew that there was always a possibility that Hotch and I wouldn’t be forever, and if that day were to ever come, I would have no right to stick around in Jack’s life. I knew that I would never be his mother even though I so desperately wanted to be. I knew that whatever pain I felt while being away from Jack was nowhere near the pain Hotch felt because they were flesh and blood. Hotch had helped bring that precious kid into this world, and he was the best father anyone could ask for. I had never seen anyone so devoted to their son like Hotch was. Therefore, I knew that despite how much I was hurting, it could never compare, yet Hotch always went the extra mile to comfort me— and maybe that was because it helped to comfort himself, too…

Before we had even gotten on the jet in Kansas City, Hotch called Haley to let her know that we were done with our case and we were flying home. She told Jack while she was still on the phone that he was going to be staying at our house for the next few days, so he needed to go get ready. I could hear him jumping with excitement in the background before running up to his room to grab his school stuff and the toys he wanted to bring to our house. He didn’t have to worry about clothes, toiletries, or anything of the sort because Hotch’s home was still his home, but Jack liked to carry his favorite toys between houses.

Back in Virginia, Hotch and I hurried from the jet to our car before anyone could stop us. Neither of us even thought to go back inside the office for our paperwork. It could wait, but seeing Jack couldn’t. As we pulled up to Haley’s house, we could see Jack peeking through the blinds in the front window to watch for us. When he spotted us, he ran from the window, and before Hotch and I could even get out of the car, Haley was already opening the door and Jack was running out towards us. Haley watched from her door as Jack jumped into Hotch’s arms and hugged his dad’s neck as tightly as he could.

Hotch winged his arms around Jack and squeezed back, “Hey, buddy.”

“Are we going to get ice cream, daddy?”

Hotch chuckled while sending me a glance that said: “This is all your fault, you know?” I smiled back and shrugged. He always liked to tell me that I was the cool one, so I wanted to give him the chance to be the cool dad for once. “Yeah. Just like we promised we would.” Hotch leaned down and set Jack back on his feet, “Go tell your mom goodbye first.” Jack spun around and hurried back to hug his mom. Hotch walked over to where I was standing on the sidewalk and he threw his arm over my shoulders and pulled me close, “You’re paying.”

I let out a chuckle, “Touche.”

He kissed my temple while he was still smiling ear to ear. “I love you.”

“I love him more,” I poked his side and escaped from under his arm. Hotch’s jaw fell agape playfully. I looked at him with wide eyes, “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”

He nodded, “Oh, yeah.”

 _Shit_.

I bit my lip and winked at him before helping Jack into the car. Hotch watched me with a smile as he got back into the car and turned the radio on for Jack. I asked him as I buckled him in what flavor of ice cream he was going to get, and when he told me “every flavor!”, Hotch laughed from the front seat.

“How about we just start with one flavor?” I asked Jack. He nodded reluctantly. “Attaboy.” I closed his car door and sat up front with Hotch. “Hey, you,” I poked his side again before he could put the car in drive. He looked at me and raised a brow. “I love you.”

He squinted, “I don’t easily forget, Greenaway. You’ll have to try harder than that.” He set the gearshift to drive, looked back at the road, and put his foot on the gas. I stared at him with bright, soft, admiration-filled eyes until I caught his attention again. He rolled his eyes at me and shook his head while smiling, “Stop it.” I didn’t look away. He sighed. “I love you, too,” he gave in.

I grinned to myself and sat back in my seat. I realized something in that moment: I was the happiest I had ever been.


	16. HELPING A COLLEAGUE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Mentions of smut, mentions of Dom/sub relationship, cursing, murder, mentions of sexual assault, literally everything Criminal Minds, okie.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 23. Day after part fifteen.

Hotch's arm tightened around my shoulders gingerly and lovingly. I leaned into his side, lifting my feet up onto the empty space on the couch to my left. Jack shifted around on the couch uncomfortably before giving up and asking if he could lay with me. I nodded and pressed my back against the couch to make more room for Jack to cuddle up in front of me. Jack crawled over and laid down with me, all three of us still facing the TV, trying to watch the movie Jack had picked out for the night. I lightly combed Jack’s hair with my fingers as he nuzzled against me.

Jack had been staying at our house for a couple of days since we returned from our case in Kansas City, and every night after dinner, he insisted that we would watch a movie together. The first night, it was fine because Jack had no homework, but the next night, Hotch had to use tough love to make him do his homework before we could wind down for a movie. The night after that, it was Friday, which meant that we had all the time in the world to do whatever Jack wanted. Naturally, when we picked him up from school, he wanted to go to the park. We headed home first to change because Hotch and I were still in work clothes, and Jack was covered in food from lunch and mud from recess. We walked to the park after that and played some soccer with him. Hotch was considerably bad at being goalie, even against a kid, but Jack had fun, and that was all that mattered— not to mention that Jack and I got to team up against Hotch, which was extremely fun for me.

Then, after that, when the sun was going down and it started to get cold, we headed back to the house and threw a frozen pizza in the oven. Jack picked out a couple of kid’s movies that he wanted to watch, and we spent the night doing that, eating pizza, and, of course, ice cream— to which Hotch was less than pleased about, if I were to be honest. I vouched for Jack, though, and promised that it wouldn’t rile him up and he would go straight to bed after the next movie. Hotch gave in after Jack and I teamed up against him again in order to gain his permission, though he didn’t exactly believe us. The good news was, Jack did indeed start to get tired about half way through the second movie, which was a relief.

It was nice that Jack trusted me to ask if he could lay down with me. All three of us were cuddled against each other with Hotch holding me, and Jack wrapped in my arms. I felt at total peace when Jack rested his head on my arm that was tucked under him. I wasn’t sure what more I could ask for in life now that I had him and Hotch. They were everything I needed, but I didn’t even know that I wanted this until Hotch came along. It all took me by surprise, but that was what made it so marvelous.

Hotch’s phone started ringing just as I was about to fall asleep in his arms. I groaned and sat up slightly so that Hotch could sneak out from under me. He pushed himself off the couch and hurried into the kitchen to answer the call without disturbing us further. Jack shifted around again like he was trying to trap me on the couch, as if he had to guess that the call was about work and he didn’t want me to go.

Just as Jack guessed, after a few minutes, Hotch leaned over the back of the couch and tapped my shoulder. I tilted my chin upwards to look at him. “We need to talk,” he whispered. I nodded to him.

“Alright, little man, let’s pause the movie real quick.” I slid my arm out from under Jack before we both sat up all the way. He rubbed his eyes out of exhaustion and yawned. I kissed the top of his head as I stood up, then followed Hotch into the kitchen. “Duty calls?” I inquired once we were alone.

Hotch shook his head. He rested his palms against the kitchen island and leaned forward. His phone was sitting right in front of him on the table, yet he didn’t touch it. “That was Strauss,” he admitted, gesturing to his phone with a short nod. I scrunched my brows together. “The team is going to be put under review starting Monday.”

“It’s too early for the annual department reviews,” I commented.

He nodded, “I know. They’re saying it’s a review, but it’s really an investigation because of everything that’s been going on recently.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Gideon’s been investigated in the past, your sister shot and killed a cleared suspect and that was put under investigation, Morgan was arrested earlier as a murder suspect, Spencer… Well… Spencer hasn’t been the same since Tobias Hankle took him, and you’re dating your superior months after you were just promoted to the team. It all makes me look irresponsible. It makes it look like I’m not doing my job.”

“But that’s not true— they’ll see that in the investigation.”

Hotch shook his head again, “Mine is the only file they didn’t pull.”

My heart sank. “What does that mean?”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “It means that they have already made their minds up about my performance.”

“It’s total bullshit, Aaron. They can’t do this.”

“They _can_ , and they have. The only thing we can do now is cross our fingers that during their investigation of the rest of the team, they might change their minds.” When he paused to think, he looked at me and saw the worry that had washed over me. His shoulders relaxed and his face softened as he stepped towards me. He took my hands in his, “Listen… Just because they didn’t pull my file, doesn’t mean they’re going to fire me. Maybe they think that I’m the best unit chief out there—”

“Which you are.”

He snickered, “Right.” His face fell flat again as he wanted to go back to being serious and sincere. “This doesn’t mean that it’s the end. Okay? So, just...” he smiled lightly to raise the mood a bit, “just be you while they do what they need to do for the evaluations.”

I carefully pulled one of my hands from his and reached up to brush some of his hair that was in his face. “We’re going to be okay,” I reassured him. He nodded slightly. “You should call Gideon and tell him.” He nodded again. “I’ll stay with you,” I said after noticing how uneasy he was about all of this. Hotch loved his job so much, and we all needed him on the team. He was the glue that held us together. If we lost him, we wouldn’t make it much further. And if he lost us… I don’t think either of us wanted to think about it.

Hotch pressed his forehead to mine and let out a quiet breath that he had been holding in his chest for so long. His eyes fell shut and he just took a moment to ground himself as our hands stayed clasped together and I played with his hair to calm him down. His breath was hot on my lips, but he didn’t kiss me yet. We just held each other, and that was all he needed for a moment.

“We’re going to be okay, just like you said,” I told him after a few minutes of silence and I was sure that he had calmed down.

He tilted my head up with his free hand and he kissed me with so much passion that I felt butterflies fluttering around in my stomach. I swore then and there that I would never get tired of that feeling. I used to think that couples like us— the ones who were sickeningly sweet— were obnoxious, but I suddenly understood the appeal. Every time he looked at me, it felt like I was seeing for the first time. Every time he touched me, my whole body felt like it was on fire, and I always needed more of him. A single touch was never enough. Anything but having all of him made me feel like I couldn’t breathe or move. His touch, his hold, his kisses, they all made me feel _alive_. Every time he kissed me, those butterflies reappeared, and they always refused to go away until I could hear him say the one thing that made me feel at home: “I love you.”

Hotch parted from me so that we could catch our breath. He licked his lips before turning to grab his phone from the kitchen island. He dialed Gideon’s number and I sat up on the table, then he brought the phone to his ears as it rang and he moved to stand between my legs. I grabbed the zipper of his quarter zip sweater and started playing with it. Hotch smiled and held my hand with slight force as a warning to stop. I squinted and kept going.

“Hey, what did I do?” Hotch asked, offended, once Gideon picked up the phone. “Roses?” I raised a brow. “Are you on a _date_?” My jaw dropped. Jason Gideon on a date? Who would have known… “And you didn’t tell me?” He put his free hand on my upper thigh. “Who are they for?” He waited for Gideon’s response. “An old college friend?” He whispered to me that Gideon wanted to know what kind of message roses send. “Roses are romantic, Jason. Get her some roses.”

“You never get me roses,” I pouted, sliding my hands down.

“You never ask for roses,” he told me. “Yeah, sorry, they’re here with me,” he said to Gideon on the phone. He paused to listen before bringing the phone down between us and putting it on speaker. Gideon was talking in the background with a florist about what kind of flowers to get besides roses. I chuckled quietly and buried my face in Hotch’s chest. Gideon came back to the phone and asked Hotch why he was calling. Hotch’s hand moved towards my knee. “Strauss called to tell us that the BAU is going to be evaluated.”

Gideon scoffed, “So what? It’s an annual evaluation.” That was what I originally thought, too. “Who cares?” Also something I had thought about.

“It’s not routine because it’s six months early. There’s been talk about the Bureau redistributing funds and making cuts in all departments.”

“So they take the jet? They take one of Garcia’s computers? C’est la vie.”

Hotch shook his head. “I think it’s going to be worse than that, Jason. I think we’ll lose members of the team if this gets out of hand somehow…” I lifted my head from his chest and eyed him with a look that said: “Tell him the whole truth.” Hotch bit his tongue for a moment while squinting at me, but then he gave in, “They didn’t pull my file.”

“Hotch, you’re the best unit chief I know. Don’t stress over it.”

“Jason, I’m the only unit chief you know,” he said with a plain face. I chortled at Hotch’s comment, but immediately stopped when his hand started gliding back up my thigh. The conversation was winding down with Gideon, everyone that needed to be covered had been said, and Hotch was starting to get a little handsy, so he decided to wrap things up. “Jason?” Gidon hummed a tone on the other side. “Button mums are something you give your mother… Go get the roses. Have fun.” Hotch hung up the call and slid his phone onto the table. “Why are you always so _distracting_?” he asked me before slamming his lips against mine.

I smirked against his kiss, “I just wanted to cheer you up.”

He leaned down ever so slightly to kiss my neck. “Remind me to get you roses in the morning.” I slapped his arm playfully, even though I silently appreciated the thought. Hotch hands slid onto my hips and he helped me off the kitchen island. “We should put him in bed,” he referenced Jack, who was still waiting on the couch for us.

“After?” I asked desperately.

He knew what I meant. He knew what I wanted because he wanted the same thing. “After…” He kissed me again with his arms wrapped around my waist. I leaned back with the kiss and sucked in a breath through my nose since he had caught me off guard. “Come on,” he pried himself away from me before things could get out of hand. He took my hand and led me out the door and back into the living room.

We walked around the couch, expecting to sit back down with Jack to finish the movie, but what we found melted my heart. Jack was asleep on the couch, curled up in the fetal position, his hands tucked under his head. I smiled and leaned into Hotch’s side. Jack looked so at peace. I didn’t want to move him for fear of waking him up by accident. I figured that there would be no harm in letting him sleep on the couch, right? Besides, if he woke up in the middle of the night, he could walk up to his room or come sleep in ours if he got scared.

“We should probably move him upstairs,” Hotch whispered, making a move to grab Jack.

I stopped him, “No, wait.” Hotch looked at me with a raised brow. “Just leave him…” I squeezed his hand and started dragging him away from the couch.

Together, we headed down the hallway past the kitchen, turned into the dining room, and made it to the stairs. I took a step up, then Hotch pulled at my hand gently, spinning me back around to face him. He took a step up to be even with me before pushing me against the wall and capturing my lips in another kiss. I thrust my hips against his to gain some friction between us, which only encouraged him to kiss me harder.

Hotch’s phone started buzzing. I moaned into his mouth in an attempt to distract him, but while his lips were still glued to mine, he pulled his phone out to see who was calling. He parted from me for a moment to take a look at the Caller I.D. before answering the call with a worried face. He nodded continuously as he listened to what the caller on the other end had to say. In the end, he said, “We’ll be there,” and hung up the phone. I slumped against the wall out of disappointment. I knew what that call meant, so I pushed myself off the wall and went to call Jessica to see if we could drop off Jack.

Hotch tried to catch my hand and apologize, but I escaped his reach. Every damn time something was about to happen, work always got in the way. It was either work or Jack; and while we loved both, sometimes I just wished that we could have some time to ourselves. Though I didn’t want to bitch about it because I knew that there was no more Hotch could do about it than I could, I knew that it would have to come up at some point soon— only after this whole evaluation debacle would be out of the way, though.

By the time I got off the phone with Jessica and returned to the living room, Hotch was already changed for work. He was carrying Jack as he continued to slumber against Hotch’s chest and shoulder. We made eye contact before I turned towards the staircase and hurried upstairs to get changed. Honestly, I lazily threw on the first pair of slacks I found on my side of the closet, matched with a wine red camisole and black suit jacket to cover up. I slid on a pair of black heels that were at the front of our closet, grabbed my badge and gun from the drawer in the bedside table, and hurried back downstairs.

Hotch carried Jack out to the car, I opened the door, and he buckled Jack in. Still, though, Jack didn’t wake or fret. I closed the door carefully and quietly before getting into the front passenger’s seat. Hotch started the car, but he waited to go. For a moment, he stared at his hands on the steering wheel like he was lost in thought.

“I’m sorry,” he spoke up, not loud enough to wake up Jack, though. I shrugged and shook my head to tell him that I didn’t blame him. “I just… I don’t want this to always come between us…” His eyes glanced over his shoulder to see if Jack was still out of it. “Work always ended up coming between me and Haley, and I don’t want that to happen again. I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen, but there’s only so much I can do.”

“You don’t have to do _everything_ , Aaron. It’s okay to share your burdens, and it’s okay that work comes first. We both worked too hard to get where we are to not let it come first. We balance it the best we can. That’s all I can ask for.”

He bowed his head in shame. There was more on his mind, and it broke my heart that he had so much going on all at once. It was all too much for him to handle… I just didn’t want him to break as a result.

“The evaluations are going to go smoothly, you’re going to be praised by the Bureau for being the best unit chief they have, and I’m _never_ going to give up on making things work.” I tried to find his eyes, but he kept looking away. “Do you hear me, Aaron Hotchner? I’m not going to stop fighting for you. Ever.” I grabbed his chin with my fingers when he still refused to look at me. “Getting called in for cases is nothing you can control. It’s annoying sometimes, yeah. No one likes it— not even Reid. But it’s the job. I’m not going to take that out on you.”

I think he needed to hear me explain that more than anything. Haley left him because he always put work over everything else, including his family. While he knew that his job was more than just catching bad guys, it was about making the world a safer place for his son; Haley never understood that. All she knew was that she was lucky to see her husband for even an entire twenty-four hours every few days. At some point, missing him just became too unbearable for her. She rathered the idea of leaving him all together to avoid getting her hopes up every time over staying and fighting to make things work. Haley was a good woman. She was nice to me when she certainly didn’t have to be. But I wasn’t going to give up as easily as she had. I wasn’t going to let the best thing that had ever happened to me slip out of my grasp.

“This works for us, even though it can be frustrating. We are who we are, and our job is what it is. I know that, you know it, and Jack knows it.” I took a moment to let his eyes search mine. “I’m sorry for how I reacted inside…”

Hotch slid his face out of my grip and he carefully pressed his foot on the gas before driving down the street. He took a left turn at the stop sign, then drove down two blocks before taking another left. We drove past six different houses before we pulled into Jessica’s driveway. Hotch sighed and unbuckled his seat. He got back out and grabbed Jack from the back, then carried him up the front door. Jessica appeared in her pajamas shortly after Hotch rang the doorbell, and she took Jack from him with a smile before closing the door again.

Once he was back in the car with me, Hotch started driving us to the crime scene we were called to. It wasn’t too far from our neighborhood, but it was certainly more in the city compared to where Hotch and I lived. As we slowed down and Hotch parked against the curb, I looked across the street to see the building which we had been called to. 

“Hotch, isn’t this Gideon’s place?” I asked. While I had never actually laid eyes upon it myself, I recognized the street and building name because Hotch sometimes drove Gideon home if he was tired or didn’t have a ride for some reason.

Hotch examined the red brick exterior of the building as he called Gideon’s cellphone, but no one picked up. We both hurried out of the car, proceeded to walk across the street together when there were no cars, and hurried into the apartment building. Hotch held the elevator door open for me so that it wouldn’t shut before I could step in, and I pressed the button for the second floor. Gideon’s floor. When the elevator dinged and the doors reopened, we were immediately greeted by a group of local cops who were trying to trade places with us so that they could go back to the lobby. As we stepped into the hallway, I could hear the echo of officers’ walkie-talkies and cameras clicking with each photo taken. We followed the noise down to the tenth apartment in the hallway. The door was wide open, and a cop was standing to keep guard. Hotch and I both flashed our credentials in the cop’s face as we nonchalantly kept walking into the apartment.

This _was_ Gideon’s place. He always had a strange fascination with birds, Charlie Chaplin, and trains. All three obsessions were enshrined in each room. The walls were covered with elegant art of all different kinds of birds, model trains lined the book shelves and tables around the place, and there was an old Charlie Chaplin poster framed and hung up in the living room.

Hotch led the way into the living room and we spun around in place to get a good look at the scene that was unfolding around us. The FBI already had units casing the place, the local PD was bagging evidence, and the coroner’s office was finishing up with the dead body on Gideon’s bed. Earlier, when Hotch had called Gideon to let him know about the investigation of the BAU, there was mention of Gideon going on a date— that was how the conversation of roses started up. All the pieces of the puzzle started to form together as the coroner moved away from the body on the bed and we could see that it was a woman in a nice, tight, black dress that someone would wear for special occasions. Gideon’s date.

“There’s so much blood…” I whispered to Hotch with a half breath. There was blood splattered on every wall imaginable in the apartment, but especially in the bedroom. The floor looked clean, like someone had cleaned up after themselves to get rid of footprints, but the sheets, the walls, and the ceilings were drenched like it had just rained blood. “If they already have a unit here… why were we called in?”

“For questioning,” Hotch whispered back. I raised a curious brow. Questioning for what? “Gideon’s likely the lead suspect in this case.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“I know,” he nodded, “but don’t you see how this looks? There’s a woman who was massacred in his home and he’s nowhere to be found.”

Hotch had a point, but it just couldn’t be possible. Sure, it looked like Gideon could have done this because all of the quick glance facts pointed to him, but we knew that Gideon wasn’t capable of something like this. Gideon already hated all of the crime and gore we saw at work. He wouldn’t _kill_ someone— especially a date that he seemed nervous about.

“Maybe someone took him?” I speculated.

Hotch grabbed his phone from his pocket again. “Cover me,” he murmured, turning his back from the crowd of cops in the apartment. I stepped in front of everyone’s view of him and looked around to make sure that no one was watching.

As Hotch started to call Gideon again, a phone in the apartment started to ring. Both Hotch and I turned to see where the ringing was coming from, and found that Gideon’s cellphone was sitting on the table in the dining area. I threw my palm up to my forehead to push back my hair and to wipe away the nervous sweat that was starting to bead. A dead woman was on his bed, the apartment was set up for a date, Gideon’s phone was on the table, and the man himself was nowhere to be found. This looked really bad. It _was_ really bad.

“I’m going to talk to the lead detective. Stay here. If the team shows up, tell them what you know as quietly as you can. We need to keep this quiet.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to investigate it, if we can.”

Hotch headed towards the bedroom to locate the lead detective, meanwhile I stayed and watched the door for any sign of our team. Morgan, JJ, Emily, and Reid all arrived a few minutes after, just as Hotch was finished speaking in the bedroom. Talk about good timing.

Morgan approached Hotch, both of them standing across from me now, while JJ, Emily, Reid stayed a few steps back to get a look at the scene. Morgan asked what all of this was about, and Hotch explained exactly what we figured would happen. Gideon was the lead suspect in the murder investigation of the woman on his bed— whoever she was. When Morgan tried to protest that outrageous claim, Hotch agreed with him, but explained, “At least six witnesses claimed to see him running out of this building while covered in blood. We’re under strict orders to not get involved because of the conflict in interest.” We all fell silent during his explanation, just trying to piece together how this could have happened. Gideon wouldn’t have done this— He couldn’t have! There was absolutely no way that he was capable of it, and we were the only people who knew that and could clear his name. Despite what Hotch said about our orders to stay out of it, the five of us all exchanged glances that implied we weren’t going to let this go. We owed that much to Gideon.

“Well, who spoke to him last?” Emily asked before turning to look into the bedroom.

Hotch crossed his arms over his chest, “We talked to him about two hours ago, but I don’t know if that’s the last call he had or not.”

“I could check his phone,” Reid offered quietly.

Hotch’s stern gaze snapped over to him. We had our orders to not get involved, but we were all antsy to do so, anyhow. Hotch was a rule follower by nature, but there were times when he let things slide— for instance, what happened on the jet to St. Louis, or even what happened in his office after he found out that Morgan and I took the Mulford file the other day. Reid was the first to flat out suggest breaking the rules in order to help Gideon, so now it was just a waiting game to see if Hotch would give in or not. If anything happened— if we got caught snooping around, protecting Gideon, or obstructing the investigation in any way, it would be on his head, not ours; and with the evaluations approaching in less than two days, and Hotch worried about his job, I thought that there was no way in hell he’d ever let us—

“Do it,” Hotch nodded slightly. Reid turned in his heels and headed to grab the phone resting on the table. Hotch addressed the rest of us to expand on the call we had with Gideon earlier, “He said that he was running late for a date, and that he didn’t know what kind of flowers to get.”

“Do we even know who she is?” Morgan asked.

“An old school friend, apparently.” Hotch looked to Emily, “Figure out what you can about the body. Quickly.” She nodded and stepped all the way into the bedroom as smoothly as she could so as to not raise alarm about her sudden interest in the body. “JJ, use your cellphone to go around and record everything around this place, then send it all to Garcia. Take pictures, videos, everything.” JJ grabbed her phone and headed to document everything starting at the door. “Go take a look around,” he whispered to me and Morgan with a hand on my arm. “ _Discreetly_.”

Morgan and I started at the door, just after JJ had cleared out of there. I put my fingers on the doorframe and ran my finger over the wood. No cracks, no breakage, no sign of forced entry at all. The door was unlocked, but the doorknobs had been polished recently, probably to get rid of fingerprints— not that it mattered since so many people from the FBI and the PD had put their hands on it without gloves. The carpet in front of the door was all scrunched and crinkled, which could have been a sign of a struggle, but since the scene had already been contaminated by a handful of officers trampling in and out of the apartment, there was no way to tell for sure. Besides the carpet, however, the lamp that was on the desk in the entryway was now unplugged and broken, but no blood; so neither the Unsub nor the victim used it as a weapon. _If_ there was a struggle, this was our only clue.

We made our way through the entryway and into the dining area. The table was still set up exactly as it had been found, except for the fact that Spencer was looking through Gideon’s phone to see if he was in contact with anyone else besides me and Hotch. There were two dining sets across from one another with full glasses of wine beside them, everything untouched. They hadn’t sat down to eat or drink yet. Why go through the trouble of setting this all up if he was just going to kill her the first chance he got? Easy answer: because he wasn’t the one to kill her. Hard question to follow that answer: who did kill her, then?

The living room was undisturbed entirely. No blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing out of place. It looked as perfect as Gideon would have left it since he was expecting a special guest. So to determine what happened, we had to piece together _how_ this happened. There was no sign of a break-in, which was likely going to point more fingers at Gideon since it was his home and he wouldn’t need to break in. But besides that, who could have been able to get into the apartment without having to break the lock or kick down the door? Someone who was let in. So the victim heard a knock at the door, and since she was expecting Gideon, she opened it, only to find that the Unsub was standing there. Startled, the victim was either pushed into the lamp or happened to back up against the desk fast enough to send it falling to the ground. She was forced into the apartment, somehow either led or carried to the bedroom, and then murdered there.

I neared Hotch’s side, our shoulders touched, but we faced opposite directions. “No sign of a struggle, no sign of a break in, no sign that she was under duress.”

“The lamp and the rugs?” he asked me quietly.

“Could have been caused by Gideon after he found the body or any of the cops who have been coming and going. There’s no way to know.”

Hotch sighed and scratched his chin while he thought. “Emily says that the Unsub tore apart her stomach in order to take various organs. He was precise with his clean cuts using a scalpel. There were traces of arousal, but no sign of any penetration.”

“He’s sexually motivated, then.”

“A sexually sadistic psychopath, actually, according to Emily. There’s something else, though…” He hesitated and I looked out the corner of my eye to glance at him. “Do you remember when the team had that case in Nevada where the Unsub got away?”

I mean, remembered Hotch telling me about it after he came back from that case. After St. Louis, when the Hollow Man took me and put a gun to my back and head, Hotch was less than eager to put me back in the field. He didn’t like that things got out of control between us, and he certainly didn’t like someone threatening my life. All of that added up to the fact that he put me on desk duty for two weeks as probation— as if _I_ weren’t the victim in that situation. It was frustrating at the time because the team kept going on cases, and I wasn't there to have their backs, but there was one case that seemed to irk everyone. They had traveled to Nevada to track down a serial killer. Gideon and Morgan had him trapped in a diner. They thought they won. But this Unsub… Frank something… he was one step ahead. He knew that the team was onto him, so he found an out for himself by taking a school bus full of children hostage. Gideon and Morgan had no choice but to let him go. Once they did, they couldn’t find him again. The trail went cold, so they had no choice but to come home and move onto the next case until he would strike again.

Hotch continued with his explanation after I gave a short nod, “His M.O. was to take the rib bones and give them to the woman he was infatuated with, Jane Hanratty is her name.” I shrugged. What did this have to do with the case? Hotch said that this Unsub cut open her stomach and took organs. “He removed her lower right rib bone,” he answered my silent question, “and he left it in her hand for us to see. He wants us to know that he’s back.”

Emily approached Hotch’s other shoulder and faced the same direction I was. “We should tell the police.”

“Just wait,” Hotch whispered. “We don’t have any physical evidence that Frank did this. We have speculations, but we’re biased. Every way you can interpret this scene, if you don’t know who Frank is, leads back to Gideon— which is on purpose. Frank wants to take Gideon down, and he’ll stop at nothing to make sure it happens. In the time it would take to tell the police everything and convince them that we’re right, Frank could kill Gideon and a handful of other people. We don’t have time to waste.”

“You said that he did this all for Jane last time,” I spoke up. “What changed between them to make him lash out again?”

Both Emily and Hotch shrugged, but she added a verbal response, “Maybe she’s dead. Maybe he killed her and he’s mad at himself?”

“Psychopaths aren’t capable of feeling love or remorse, though.”

“Clearly Frank is different,” Hotch responded. “Emily, take the others to see if you can find Gideon in the area, and if not, head back to the office. We need to get ahead of this before it’s too late.”

“What about you guys?” she asked us.

“We’ll stay here to answer any questions the PD will have, and we’ll continue to quietly monitor the investigation. Just wait for my calls.”

Emily nodded before leaving with the rest of the team. Hotch finally let out a sigh and faced me. This was bad. Really fucking bad. If their theory about Frank was true, then Gideon was in a lot more trouble than we had anticipated. A psychopath was out there with a vendetta against Gideon. He started with trying to frame him, but since that wasn’t exactly panning out, there was only so long Gideon could run and hide from Frank.

Hotch’s phone started ringing again. Surprise, surprise. He answered as quickly as possible. “Hello?” He waited a beat. “Hello?” Still waiting. Then his face perked up with interest. “Where are you?” Hotch eyed me out the corner of my eye, and I knew that it had to be Gideon. “Was Jane with him?” So it was Frank who had done this, and it was all about Jane. “He called you?” his brows narrowed. “ _Do not_ , under any circumstances, turn yourself in. Do you hear me? If you do that, this investigation moves into an interrogation room and everyone will have their tunnel vision focused on locking you up and not finding Frank. _We_ know who he is, we’ve handled him before. Help us find the why so that we can finally catch him. Alright?” He waited another few seconds to listen. “Find somewhere quiet to work, we’ll take care of the rest. I’ll send Garcia to you with anything you need.” He pulled the phone from his ear and buried it in his pocket without giving Gideon a proper goodbye. Hotch looked at me, “Let’s talk outside.”

I nodded and followed him quietly out of the apartment building. Out on the street, the team was just getting back from searching the area for Gideon like Hotch had instructed. We avoided them before they could see us and headed to an alleyway across the street. We approached a dumpster and came to a slow and steady stop. Hotch stared at it and sighed. It smelled absolutely disgusting, even from where we were standing on the other side. I prayed to myself that Hotch wasn’t about to do what I thought he was going to do. I promised myself right then that if he did, I wouldn’t sleep with him for a week— hell, I don’t think I would have _touched_ him for a week. Even if he wanted to kiss me or sleep in the bed with me, he was going to have tough as shit luck.

“Please don’t,” I begged after he gave me a regretful look. “I know I was all sappy in the car and promised to always fight for you and to make this work, but I swear to god, Aaron Hotchner, if you get in that dumpster right now, I _will_ leave you.”

“Gideon said that Frank dropped something in there as he was running after him.”

I stared at him with a flat face. Like, couldn't he make Morgan do it? Hotch was still kind of mad at us for taking the file when he felt that it was his responsibility to complete the report, not ours. This could have been, like, some kind of punishment for Morgan… right?

“I love you?” he treaded carefully. I shook my head. “You could at least say it before I go digging around in a dumpster.”

“Oh, no, no, no. You’ve hit rock bottom, Agent Hotchner. I refuse to let those three words leave my mouth in regards to you ever again.”

Hotch rolled his eyes and groaned out of annoyance as he stepped up to the dumpster. “You say that now,” he pulled himself up, “but you’re always begging to say it when we’re alone,” he pushed himself over the edge, “and in the bedroom,” he landed on his feet in the dumpster. 

I shook my head, “I have never been more attracted to you in my whole life.”

“Sarcasm. Nice. We’ll see where that gets you after this is all over with and we’re back at home.” He held his breath as he bent down to start searching in the dark for whatever Frank must have left in there, according to Gideon.

After a few minutes, Hotch laughed in a state of eureka and lifted a plastic bag over his head. He held it out for me and I took it so that he could pull himself out of the dumpster. I started shuffling a few steps to get ahead of him before he could try to grab my waist and pull me in for a kiss or something. I opened the bag as we neared the end of the alleyway and there were finally street lamps to help me see. Unsurprisingly, there were bloody clothes all shoved inside without care. If everyone saw Gideon running out of the building, but no one saw Frank, this was likely why. He knew that he had to blend in, so he changed into Gideon’s clothes and walked out of the apartment like nothing happened.

Hotch and I headed back across the street and met up with the team as they were discussing our options going forward. Morgan spotted us approaching and pointed us out to JJ, Emily, and Reid. They all turned and I held the bag up to show them what we had been off doing. Hotch explained that Gideon told him over the phone to go looking for it in the dumpster, and Morgan cracked a joke that he could tell where we had been without us needing to say it.

“This is all the proof we need now, though, right? I mean, we can turn Frank into the MPD to clear Gideon’s name,” Emily said.

“By the time this comes back from the lab, Frank will be long gone,” Hotch responded while shaking his head.

“If the cops find out that we’re hiding evidence and a material witness from them, then—” Morgan began.

“We’re not hiding evidence. We’ll still turn it over to forensics, but we need to keep looking for Frank if we’re going to stop him.”

“Agent Morgan?” a kid asked as he skated over to us on his skateboard. We all turned with confusion plastered to our faces. “They say beauty can cover a multitude of sins, while underneath it all, we all look exactly the same.”

Morgan started frantically looking over his shoulders for something— or _someone_. “Frank said that to me in the diner,” he explained to us while still searching around.

“Give me Jane or I’ll kill them all,” the boy continued.

Morgan stopped to look at Hotch with wide eyes. “Frank thinks that we have Jane?”

“Can I have my $10 now?”

I scrunched my brows together while the rest of the team ignored him to discuss the fact that Frank was doing all of this because he thought that we had Jane. She wasn’t dead like Emily had guessed. She was somewhere out there, but she wasn’t with us nor Frank. If we were going to end this, and save whoever it was he was threatening this time, then we needed to find her fast. Hotch told JJ to call Garcia and have her meet Gideon on Lowland Avenue. JJ nodded and stepped off to go do as she was told.

“Hey, yo, my $10, man,” the kid poked Morgan’s arm. Morgan shrugged off the kid’s touch while still talking to Hotch. “Come on!” I rolled my eyes before pulling out my wallet and handing the kid his $10 so that he would just go away.

“Gideon mentioned that he saw Jane just before Frank killed the woman upstairs,” Hotch explained. “She’s in town and Frank thinks that we have her. If we find her, we get Frank. That has to be our play.”

“The last time we found Frank, he outsmarted us by taking a busload of children hostage. He didn’t give us options before, what makes you think he won’t do the same this time around?” Emily inquired.

“Frank’s message said ‘I’ll kill them all’,” Spencer commented. “Who is he referring to?”

JJ came back from her call with Garcia. ”She’s on her way to meet him now,” she told Hotch. “She said that she looked through everything I sent her, and the one thing that stood out to her was that in Gideon’s black leather-bound book, the first page was missing. She said that all that was left of what was there was a list of numbers.”

“It’s his murder book,” Hotch clarified to us. “The front page, it’s a list of all of the people he has ever saved. He has all of their information in it because he likes to keep up to date with them to remind himself why he still does this. And now Frank has the list.”

“Frank said that he’s going to kill them all,” I said. “He’s going after the people who encourage Gideon to keep doing this job.”

“JJ, when we get back to the office, start locating all of the nearest possible targets. Those of them that still talk to him are memorialized in photos on his desk in his office. Start there. The rest of us will try to narrow down where Jane could possibly be.”

Everyone hurried back to their cars and we started racing towards Quantico. I told Hotch when we got in the car together that he should probably change into the clothes in his go bag when we would get there since he smelled from digging in the trash. He agreed and told me that I should start profiling all of the victims Gideon saved in recent years. I was the only one who was able to profile Gideon before when I was first offered the spot on the team, so I could do it again. Gideon had favorites, it was just a matter of finding the ten or so needles in a haystack of thousands of different possibilities.

At the office, Hotch hurried into his office to grab his go bag and to change in the bathroom. The rest of us headed into the boardroom to start narrowing down the endless options. JJ already had all of Gideon’s framed photos from his office set up on the table by the time I sat down. She turned one of them over to face me and asked if I knew who it was standing next to Gideon in the image. I told her that it was Gideon’s son, and that we should not concern ourselves with him because he wouldn’t be listed in the journal. JJ threw her hands up in surrender, her eyes widening as she gave the table a look that said: “I’m sorry I asked.”

Hotch came up the ramp and stormed into the board room, “JJ, did you talk to the media yet?”

“They already have Frank and Jane’s names and faces. They’ll run it with the morning news.”

“Good. We need to make sure that we get to her first so that we can interrogate her.”

“Is that the wise thing to do?” Morgan questioned.

“Not at all, but it’s our only chance of taking Frank down. He’s in love with her, so he likely told her everything about himself. Have we made any progress with this?” He gestured to the table of photos.

“We think we have it narrowed down to nine,” Reid answered. “All nine of them are in the city, are in constant contact with Gideon via email and phone calls, and they’re all doing well for themselves since the investigations including them concluded.”

“Now it’s just down to calling all of them to warn them,” Emily said.

“Everyone grab a file and start dialing a number,” Hotch ordered, taking a seat.

We all reached into the middle and grabbed a case each, but JJ, Hotch, and I took one extra. I started with my first call to Elizabeth Reynolds. She picked up after the second ring. I told her that I was an agent with the FBI, and I was wondering if she was at home and safe. She told me that she was with her family at her mother’s house in Vermont. When she proceeded to ask what this was all about, I told her that it was just a routine check in and concluded my call with her. Everyone else seemed to have the same shit luck finding any leads with their calls as they ended at the same time. Hotch was already through his second one, that was how fast we were calling around. JJ was in the middle of her call as I grabbed Rebecca Garner’s file. It looked like she had changed her last name to Brian since we rescued her a few months ago, and, honestly, I couldn’t blame her. If I were her, I wouldn’t want anything to do with the name Garner either.

I bit my lip as the line buzzed between each ring. It took about four rings for the call to be picked up on the other end. I waited for someone else to say something to make sure I wouldn’t give away who was calling just in case it was anyone but Rebecca.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Rebecca Brian? This is Y/N Greenaway. I was one of the agents who rescued you from your father’s house.”

“He’s not Agent Gideon, is he?”

My blood ran cold. Everyone in the room turned to face the speaker. I looked up at Hotch and searched his eyes for comfort, maybe? I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The Fisher King case was one of the first big ones I had worked on with the team. Randall Garner fucked with all of us just because he thought he was stuck in some fantasy world where we were the Knights of the Round Table and we could somehow cure his burns. He did all of that, plus he kidnapped his only surviving daughter, all just to lure us to his house. We saved Rebecca. We won that night. This shouldn’t have had to happen to her again.

Hotch leaned over the table, “Rebecca, this is Agent Aaron Hotchner. If you can, very calmly excuse yourself and get out of the house. Can you do that?”

“What’s going on?” she asked with worry.

We heard her whimper on the other end of the call, and then there was a loud crash.

“Rebecca?” I called for her calmly. “Rebecca? Are you still there?” There was no response. “Rebecca?”

“There you are, Agent Greenaway,” Frank said into the call. “It’s so lovely to finally meet you. Well, at least to hear your voice. I regret to inform you that Rebecca’s name should be moved to a new list.”

“Frank, we don’t have Jane,” Hotch spoke up.

“I will not stop until I have her back.” And then he hung up.

We all looked at each other as silence hung in the air. We were too late. Frank had already gotten to her, and by the time we could get to her house, she would be dead. What were we supposed to do? He would be gone from her apartment before we could even get there. There was literally nothing we could do to save her. We spent those three agonizingly long days trying to take Randall Garner down and save Rebecca Garner. Elle got shot because of that case. Saving Rebecca was a huge win for us, and now Frank had stolen that victory from us.

The only thing we could do was head to Rebecca’s apartment and see if Frank left any clues with her body… That was the sad truth. There was no race to get there, there was no need to call in the SWAT team for back up, and there was no reason to even gear up with our vests.

We failed her entirely.


	17. FRANK AND JANE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing, murder, mentions of sexual assault, literally everything Criminal Minds, okie.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 2 Episode 23. Right after part sixteen.

It was a sad and quiet walk to the car as Morgan, Hotch, Emily, and I all headed to the crime scene. When we got there, the door to Rebecca’s apartment was wide open. There was no sign of forced entry, which meant that she had originally believed that he was Gideon, like she said on the phone, so she invited him in. The house phone that I had called was smashed on the ground in the living room, and there was a single cup of coffee on the table in front of the couch. I reached down and felt the outside of the mug to find that it was cold. Frank was long gone, just as expected.

Morgan kicked the bedroom door open after jiggling the locked door handle around. Hotch and Morgan took the lead heading inside while Emily and I kept pressure on the tail end for backup, not that it ultimately mattered. After the door flew open, we discovered Rebecca’s body on her bed in the same state that the woman in Gideon’s apartment had been found.

Hotch sighed to himself and took a step out of the apartment. I followed for a brief moment, but I didn’t end up going any further than the couch in the living room. I took a quiet seat and hid my face in my hands. There must have been some hope still brewing in my chest on the car ride over because seeing Rebecca hit my heart harder than it should have. I didn’t know her. I didn’t have any connection to her other than being a part of her rescue team that night we saved her. And yet, I felt almost responsible for her. We could have done more to protect her. We should have called her first. At the time, it didn’t make sense to call one potential target over another, but I should have just done it… She could perhaps still have been alive if we just called a few minutes sooner to warn her.

Emily walked by, “I’m going to check on Hotch,” she told me. I nodded and whispered a thank you.

“Y/N,” Morgan called my name from the bedroom. “You should come take a look at this…”

He sounded concerned about something, so I sucked in a brave breath before stepping into the room. Morgan was holding evidence in his gloved hands, searching through a stack of… whatever it was he found… As I approached, Morgan held the evidence out to the side, but he didn’t look up at me, almost like he was too scared to. Hesitantly, I took what he was offering in order to look for myself. The second it was out of his hands, Morgan turned to find something else to work on.

I looked down at my hands and the evidence they were holding. Within an instant, I felt like yelping or screaming, yet nothing came out. As my blood ran cold, I stayed paralyzed and looked at the photos in my hands. All this time, I thought that they had burned in the fire; yet there they were. Intact and staring back at me.

I swallowed hard. “Has Hotch or Emily seen these?” Morgan shook his head, though still refusing to look at me. I didn’t blame him after what he had just seen. I wouldn’t want to look at me either. “Don’t tell him,” I quietly begged.

“It’s evidence, Y/N.”

“They don’t exist,” I insisted, putting them in the inside pocket of my jacket. “They burned in the fire at Randall Garner’s home.”

“Y/N—“ he turned around, finally finding enough dignity to look at me.

I stared him down, “They don’t… _exist_.” His eyes frantically searched mine, but I stayed calm. “Hotch can never see them.”

Morgan kept staring at me as if it would change my mind. It wouldn’t. I genuinely thought that this had all ended the night Randall Garner died and his house burned down. I thought that the images he stole from me disappeared with him. There wasn’t a single day since then where I even thought about those photos, because why would I when I had tried so hard to forget them in the first place and then I had reason to believe that they had been wiped from existence. Not once did the thought cross my mind of there being a possibility that those photos were still out there. If I would have known, I would have searched through heaven and hell to find them and burn them myself. Yet there they were now, hiding in my jacket, out of sight of the one person I didn’t want to ever lay eyes on them. Hotch was a well grounded, smart man. He didn’t like to use his position at the FBI for any kind of personal gain— including finding people or digging up dirt on whomever he wanted. But if he saw those pictures… If he knew that they _really_ were, he wouldn’t stop until he found the boy that did that to me, and he would kill him. Therefore, Hotch could _never_ know, the same way Elle could never know. That was, if I ever ended up seeing my sister again.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he whispered to me.

I shook my head, “They don’t exist. It never happened.”

His face softened, “Y/N—”

“It never happened, Morgan. Please. Just… drop it…”

“You know that I, of all people, get it. Right? You can talk to me.”

“And you should know, of all people, that I just want you to drop it and never talk about it again.”

Morgan took a physical step back to signify him backing down from the conversation. He turned back to looking around the room for more evidence, meanwhile I paced around the bed to look at Rebecca’s body. It was left in an identical state compared to the body last night. Her stomach had been cut open, obvious organs missing— but I wouldn’t know until Reid or a coroner could take a look. There was an incision on the left side of her chest, just where there was easy access to a rib, if that was really what his M.O. was. I froze and squinted when I noticed that she was clutching something in her right palm.

“Morgan,” I called his attention over. I pried Rebecca’s hand open slightly and slid the piece of paper out of her tight grip. “It says ‘7AM, Union Station. I’ll trade her for Jane.’” Morgan and I exchanged a glance. “Hotch!” I yelled. Him and Emily came in a few seconds later and I handed the note to him.

“So he’s taken someone else already,” Emily spoke up. 

“Or at least he’s planning on it.”

“Let’s think about this. All other eight possible targets are safe and accounted for, so what— or _who_ — did we miss?” Morgan questioned. “Frank isn’t capable of feeling the same feelings we do, but he enjoys mimicking them because he finds it fun. He takes what other people hold sacred and he uses it against them. So what does that say about his next target?”

“People hold women and children most sacred,” Emily worked out. “He said that he’d be willing to trade ‘her’ for Jane, but he wouldn’t have given that detail if he didn’t want us to narrow down the list, so it has to be a kid.”

“Call JJ and ask her to search through all of the child victims we’ve worked with in recent years and have moved to the D.C. area so recently that Gideon wouldn’t have it marked down,” Hotch told Emily. Emily left the bedroom. “Did you guys find anything else in here?”

Morgan looked over at me like he was waiting for some kind of cue to admit what he found, but I shook my head vaguely. “We didn’t find anything else,” Morgan answered finally.

“Hotch,” Emily said breathlessly as she ran back in, “JJ says that the only girl who matches the description and isn’t accounted for is a girl named Tracey Belle.” Hotch eyes shot wide. “She also says that they found Jane.”

“Okay, go back to the office to meet up with JJ and sort things out with Jane. Morgan, stay here with the crime scene while the PD is on their way, Y/N and I will go to the Belle’s residence. Have JJ send us the address. Let’s go.”

* * *

Hotch and I hurried to McLean, Virginia where Tracey Belle’s family had moved to after our team saved her from a child Unsub long before I joined the team. I knew nothing about Tracey Belle or the case she was involved in, except for the fact that there was a boy in her grade who was luring other kids to the woods and murdering them out there. Tracey was supposed to be his last victim, but the team managed to get there in time to stop him before anything could happen. Thankfully. But now, there was a strong chance that Frank had her. She was going to relive her worst nightmares all over again…

The sun was already down again with another day concluded, which was both a blessing and a curse. While the darkness would help Hotch and I approach the house undetected, it also meant that Frank could hide or run and we wouldn’t even know it— or even worse, he could have already killed Tracey.

Hotch kicked down the door and I pushed into the house first with my weapon and flashlight raised. We moved quickly and quietly, checking every corner of the living room, kitchen, and dining room. When there was no sign of a struggle or Tracey at all, we moved down the hallway towards the bedrooms. The first door on our left was open, and it looked like Tracey’s father’s office. Past that, on the right, was Tracey’s parents’ room, which was also empty. The last room to check was Tracey’s room at the end of the hall on the left again. The door was closed, unlike the other rooms. I gave Hotch a short nod as I put my hand on the doorknob, and he returned the signal. I turned the handle, pushed the door open as fast and hard as I could, and Hotch ran in first.

Empty. Entirely empty.

There was no sign of Tracey or her family anywhere. While that seemed like a loss— which, in reality, it technically was— it was also still a win. If Frank was going to hurt Tracey, he would have already killed her in her home like he had done with the other victims. From the looks of it, he took Tracey. The only question was, however, where were her parents?

“I’ll call a forensics team,” Hotch said. “Call Morgan and have him meet us here.”

While Hotch turned to call the office, I grabbed my phone and dialed Morgan. I asked if he was done at Rebecca’s house yet, and he told me that they were just bagging up her body and then the crime scene cleaners were going to come in, which he didn’t need to be there for. I told him that we needed him down at the Belle’s residence as soon as possible. He sighed and hesitantly asked me if she was dead.

“No. Frank just took her.”

“I’m on my way.”

Thirty minutes later, while Hotch and I were casing the house as best we could ourselves, Morgan and the forensics team showed up with the local sheriff's department. We stepped out of the house to let them do what they needed to do in order or to determine exactly what happened to Tracey. Morgan met us out front and we started to discuss why Frank would have possibly taken Tracey, of all people. According to them, Frank wasn’t fond of children, which was why the school bus hostages were a shock to them in the first place, but now this? He was getting desperate. He was losing track of who he enjoyed murdering because he was so focused on Jane. That being said, he didn’t kill Tracey, so maybe she was meant to be a gift for Jane, and in that case, Tracey would be safe unless we didn’t give Frank what he wanted.

“That’s our house, Charlie!” someone shouted from the road.

Hotch, Morgan, and I looked over to see Tracey’s parents getting out of their car and running up towards the house. The three of us stepped in their path to make sure they wouldn’t get through. I recognized the worry on their faces as uncontrollable panic about their daughter’s safety, but we wouldn’t let them into the house until the forensics team was done inside.

“You have to let us in,” Mrs. Belle told us desperately while trying to push past me. “My daughter’s inside.”

“You can’t go in right now,” Hotch tried to explain to them calmly.

“Where’s Tracey? Where’s my daughter?”

“Mrs. Belle—” I began, but she didn’t listen. She was still fighting against me as if I would suddenly budge and move out of her way, but I was going to do no such thing.

“What’s important to know right now is that Tracey is, in fact, alive,” Hotch said. Mr. Belle saw an opportunity to push through Morgan and Hotch, so he attempted to take it, but Morgan caught him before he could make it to the door. “Sir, she’s not in there!” Mr. Belle threw his hands up in surrender and stepped back. “We’re going to find her, I promise,” he said to both parents.

Mrs. Belle stopped fighting against me and suddenly broke down in my arms. She fell to her knees with me barely catching her in time, and she began to sob. Mr. Belle hurried over and took Mrs. Belle from my arms so that he could hold her as they both cried. They thought that all of this was over after they moved… They thought that their daughter was safe because our team had saved her before, but now she was gone and we were back on their doorstep.

The way Mrs. Belle cried and screamed out for her baby shattered my heart as the three of us stood around and watched. She rocked in her husband’s embrace and tried to muffle her sobs, but they were so agonizingly painful in her heart and chest that she couldn’t hold them back. My jaw clenched as I swallowed back the feeling of needing to cry in response. The tears that had started welling my eyes disappeared after I looked away and blinked furiously to make the fog over my eyes go away.

“We should go back to the office,” I whispered to Hotch. I was too scared to say anything louder than that because I thought that the sob collecting in my throat would escape if I raised my voice above a whisper. I took in a steady breath before stepping around the Belles.

If what Emily said earlier about JJ locating Jane was still true, they were likely back at the BAU already interrogating her for information, and since we hadn’t received another call from them, I was going to go out on a limb and guess that they weren’t getting anything of use yet. Hotch was the best interrogator we had, if anyone could do it, it was him. We were practically useless at the crime scene now, there was no point in staying when he could be finding a way to end this once and for all without giving Jane to Frank again and without getting Tracey killed. There had to be answers. There had to be a way to get that little girl back to her family.

“We need to talk,” Morgan said, coming up to me as I leaned against the side of the car while waiting on Hotch. I opened my mouth to protest because I knew exactly where this was headed, but he put up a hand to tell me to be quiet and just listen, so I decided to give him a shot at not making my night any worse than it already was. “You know what I went through growing up. I didn’t want people to know the truth either, yet they found out. They _always_ find out, Y/N. Everyone got hurt and lost their trust in me because I chose to hide that secret over helping them find the man responsible. Hotch still struggles to trust me sometimes.” He shifted his weight on his feet. “You can’t keep it a secret forever even though you think you can. That man over there loves you more than anything in the world. I have never in my life seen anyone look at another person the way the two of you look at each other. You don’t want to lose that because of these photos, Y/N. It’s not worth it.”

“It’s not for him to know, though. It happened decades ago. What’s the point in bringing it all back up when all it will do is hurt people? Nothing will be solved suddenly if I show him the pictures and tell Hotch every single thing that boy did to me. He’s better off not knowing.”

“If it were Hotch keeping a secret like this from you, wouldn’t you want to know?”

I paused. Truthfully, I would want to know. But it wasn’t fair of Morgan to force the decision on me like this. He was right that I knew exactly what happened to him, but he forgot that I also knew how adamant he was about not telling anyone and how when I pieced it together myself, I didn’t tell anyone because it was his secret to tell when he wanted. Telling Hotch the truth was the most petrifying concept to me. During the Fisher King case, I had hinted to him what happened, but he didn’t know the extent of it, and he certainly didn’t need to see the photos.

“Does it get any better after they know?” I asked him.

Morgan’s eyes fluttered as he looked at the ground. “No,” he shook his head, “I don’t suppose it does.”

“You know that I love and respect you, Morgan… but I just… I need to think about it, at least.”

“Are you two ready to go?” Hotch asked as he met us at the car. Neither of us looked up at him or each other. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head and relaxed my shoulders. “Nothing.” I opened the car door and got in.

* * *

At the BAU, Reid met us as the elevator doors opened. He explained that Jane had turned herself in to local police because she had nowhere else to go and she wanted to talk with Gideon. He also said that she seemed on edge. She was scared, obviously, but there was something more to it than that, but no one could figure out what.

When we entered the mirror room, I could see that Emily and JJ were still in the interrogation room with Jane, trying to get her to talk while she held onto a brown paper bag for dear life. Morgan and Reid took a few side steps to stand in front of the window, but I moved to follow Hotch into the interrogation room.

“Stay in here, Y/N,” Hotch said. “She doesn’t know you, so it might turn her off from talking if there’s someone in the room that she doesn’t recognize.” I nodded agreeingly and went to stand in front of the mirror with Morgan and Reid.

Jane clutched the bag closer to her chest. “Frank hasn’t hurt anyone, has he? He wouldn’t do that… Not while he has me…”

“But he doesn’t have you, Jane,” JJ explained. “We do.”

“Why did you leave Frank? What changed?” Emily asked.

“Frank changed,” Jane answered. “Agent Gideon warned me that this would happen, but I didn’t believe him when I should have. Frank isn’t who he says he is. That’s why Frank’s mad with Agent Gideon because he knows everything about Frank. That’s why I need to see him.”

“Frank wants Agent Gideon to stop him, doesn’t he?” Hotch inquired quietly from the corner. Everyone was using hushed tones with her because she was such a fragile woman. Anything over a whisper would have made her spiral, which we didn’t have time for.

“Well, if anyone can stop him, it’s Agent Gidoen.”

“Not without you, Jane.”

“What do you mean?”

Hotch changed the subject, “Tell me what you know about Frank. Where is he from?”

“Manhattan. He talked about it all the time. He told me about where he lived and how he grew up, everything. He wanted me to know everything.”

“Did he say where in Manhattan?”

She shook her head, “No, but he said that he lived with his mother, Mary Breitkopf. Just his mother, though. He never knew his father, but he still despised him. He loved his mother more than anything. She would take him to the fair, and to the movies when they could afford it, they would have dinner parties when they couldn’t, and she read stories to him every night. He even had me read some of them to him to help him sleep.”

“Did Frank try to kill anyone else while you guys were on the run?”

“Is it wrong to love Frank?” she dodged Hotch’s question by asking Emily another one. Emily raised a curious brow. “You know, since he is what he is… Is it wrong?”

“You don’t choose who you love,” Emily answered.

My eyes unconsciously switched to look at Hotch. He looked at the mirror as if he could see me and I realized that he was thinking the same thing. We would fight tooth and nail for each other and to make our relationship work, just as I had told him in the car the night before. Jane seemed to feel that way about Frank, but we knew what kind of man he was, and there was no way that he could return the same desperate feelings.

Hotch looked back at the table in the middle of the room. “Jane, did Frank try to kill anyone else?”

She nodded, “Me…” She lowered her head as she started to cry quietly. “We had an argument, and as it blew up, I said that Agent Gideon was right, and he became so angry. So I ran and I didn’t look but.” She looked back up, “But he won’t try to kill anybody else. I promise.”

“He’s already killed two people, Jane,” JJ said. “And he’s not going to stop until he gets you back.”

“Oh…”

There was a knock at the door suddenly. Morgan, Reid, and I all turned to see who it was. Anderson poked his head into the room and told us that there was a call for Hotch and that it was extremely urgent. When I inquired about who it was, he said that it was Tracey Belle. I immediately reached for the door to the interrogation room and told Hotch that we had a problem. Hotch uncrossed his arms and hurried past me, Morgan, Reid, and Anderson. We all ran after him as Anderson tried to explain that it was Tracey Belle who had called and she sounded upset— which, of course she fucking was, Frank had her.

“Hello?” Hotch welcomed as he picked up the phone on his desk and put it on speaker for us to hear.

“Agent Hotchner,” Frank began, “we asked for Agent Gideon, not you. Put him on the phone.”

Hotch reached down to the phone and speed dialed Garcia’s number since Gideon didn’t have his phone on him. When she picked up, Hotch said, “Garcia, put Jason on the phone. There’s someone who wants to talk to him.”

“Who is this?” Gideon asked once he had the phone.

“Jason?” Tracey questioned, her voice shaking with fright. “It’s Tracey Belle.”

“Go on, Tracey,” Frank encouraged from the background. “Just like we practiced.”

“Please, Mr. Gideon,” Tracey sniffled, “you have to help me. You saved me once before. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember you, Tracey. How could I ever forget you?” Gideon chuckled lightly and playfully, trying to brighten Tracey’s mood. “Tracey, everything’s going to be alright.”

“I’m scared, Mr. Gideon… I want my mommy…”

I sat down on the couch in Hotch’s office as I choked back that same need to cry that I felt at the Belle’s residence. Tracey was crying out for her mother in the same way that Mrs. Belle had been crying out for her daughter. It all rang in my head over and over again, the crying and the screaming.

“Jason,” Frank sing-songed into the call.

“You son of a bitch,” Gideon cursed into the phone. “I swear I will find you no matter what it takes and I will take you down.”

“Shhh,” Frank cooed. “I chose the station because I know of your interest in trains. I saw the toys in your apartment before I killed your date.” And then he hung up.

Silence hung in the air as we all stared at each other. We only had a few hours until the sun would start to rise and we were supposed to meet Frank at Union Station with Jane. There was no other choice than to play by his rules, though, right? If we wanted to get that little girl back to her family safe, then we needed to give him Jane. That being said, there was no way in hell Frank actually believed that we would let him get away again. Even if we did give him Jane, they weren’t going to get very far. D.C. and Virginia was our turf, not his. We knew how to tear apart the entire East coast if need be. He wasn’t going to win again. Especially since he made it personal with Gideon this time around.

Hotch picked up the phone and dialed the SWAT team to let them know that we would be heading to Union Station around 6:30 in order to be there on time for 7AM. Morgan paced around the room, biting at his nails, and Reid sat down on the couch with me while lost in thought. He was likely thinking of a way to get Frank after this was all over with. We knew that no matter what, we had to be the ones to get to Frank, because if Gideon got there first, he would kill him, and Reid couldn’t afford to lose Gideon because of a dumb mistake.

Morgan stopped pacing when Hotch hung up the phone and looked up at the three of us. “Boardroom. Now. Reid, get Emily and JJ.”

Reid stood and ran to the interrogation room to go collect them, and in the meantime, Hotch, Morgan, and I walked down the lifted walkway outside of Hotch and Gideon’s offices and into the boardroom. Hotch pulled up a map of the train station on the TV and we started making our plan for how we were going to clear the station, get to Frank, find out where Tracey was, and then arrest Frank. We had to be _exact_. There was no room for error. Fucking this up could result in either Tracey’s death or Frank getting away again— or both, if we were too careless.

“Hotch, we think we might know where Frank is keeping Tracey Belle,” JJ said as she, Emily, and Reid all stormed into the room. Hotch raised a curious brow. “Jane said that he is obsessed with his mother. Well, I did some digging, and it says that she’s still living in the Upper East Side in New York. Since taking Tracey, he would have had enough time to drive up there, leave her with his mother, and he could be back in time for our meeting at Union Station.”

“He _would_ want to get her as far from us as possible,” Emily shrugged, explaining further, “just to make sure that we don’t get to her before he gets Jane.”

Hotch nodded, “No lead is a bad lead. JJ and Reid, take the jet to Mary Breitkopf’s home, see if you can find Tracey there. Meet with the field office there and have a task force go with you. We can’t afford to let Frank or his mother get away.”

JJ and Reid left together to get ready for their flight to New York while the rest of us looked back at the map of the train station. Hotch showed us exactly what plan he had in mind for the 7AM meet time. Our team, along with backup from SWAT, would move into the station and clear it out as quietly as possible. Frank won’t leave or hide in the crowd because he knows that this is his only chance of getting Jane back— just like when he stayed around in the diner in Nevada. Hotch was going to talk to Frank first, see if he would budge and tell us where Tracey was, even though that wasn’t very realistic. Eventually, we would have to show Jane to Frank in order to get Tracey’s location, since by the time Reid and JJ would get to his mother’s house in New York to check if she was there, this would all be unfolding. If it came down to it, we would have to give Jane over to Frank, and he would likely tell us to wait so that they could run again; but the local PD would have road blocks surrounding the area to make sure that he wouldn’t get too far. Our job would be to help find Frank once he was gone, but there wasn’t much we could do to stop him while at the station if things progressed, unfortunately. 

At 6:30, we geared up and headed out to Union Station. The SWAT team was waiting in the back of the parking lot for us since they didn’t want to scare off the public or Frank just yet. We needed to make sure that Frank remained calm until 7AM when we would find him somewhere inside, so it was a safer bet if our team went in quietly without our weapons out. People were in too much of a hurry around the station to notice a few FBI agents spread out amongst the building. Hotch put me and Emily on guard at the inside platform, and Morgan and Hotch were going to take the lobby. We headed in quietly and calmly, Emily and I splitting off from the boys as soon as we entered the building.

For the thirty or so minutes leading up to 7AM, Emily and I paced and searched the platforms to see if we could spot Frank anywhere. If we were lucky enough, we’d catch him in the crowd and we could take him in for interrogation over anything else. Frank liked being in control and being powerful, and by taking a hostage, he had both because we were playing by his rules. But if we shoved him in a dark, windowless interrogation room for long enough, he would tell us where Tracey was.

At 6:58AM exactly, the SWAT team moved into the station to start clearing out all of the civilians. Emily and I searched every face that passed by us to make sure that Frank wouldn’t slip out— just in case our profile of him was wrong. He wanted Jane, yes, but maybe he would get scared off by all of the armed agents running around. But there was no sign of him on the inside platform after everyone cleared out. Even if he was on the outside ones, he would have needed to pass by us or the boys in the lobby. He was either waiting somewhere for us or he was long gone.

“The building’s clear,” we heard from the SWAT team through the comms. Emily and I exchanged a glance. “Target spotted on the platform outside. Target spotted.”

“Emily, get Jane,” Hotch said over the comms.

Emily turned around and headed back for the lobby and the parking lot where Jane was sitting in one of the cars, waiting for us to get her. I immediately jumped onto my toes and started racing for the tunnel that led to the outside platform. The platform was entirely clear except for Frank, who was sitting alone on a bench, and Morgan and Hotch who were carefully approaching. Morgan passed the back of the bench to stand on Frank’s left side, while Hotch and I stood on his right side.

Hotch stood his ground and stared at the man sitting on the only bench on that side of the platform. “Frank,” he greeted casually.

“Agent Hotchner. Agent Greenaway. It’s a pleasure to formally meet both of you finally.”

“Where’s Tracey Belle?” Hotch wasn’t having any of Frank’s shit. We weren’t going to give up Jane until we knew for sure that Tracey was still alive and well. When Frank didn’t respond, Hotch asked again, to which he was met with Frank asking if we brought Jane. “Maybe we did. Tell us where Tracey Belle is and we’ll give you Jane.”

Frank tsked his tongue, “That’s not how this is going to work, Agent Hotchner. I see Jane first and I will tell you exactly where the girl is.”

Hotch sucked in a deep breath, his face still sour and flat. He waited another minute in silence before lifting his wrist comm to his mouth and telling Emily to bring Jane out. The platform was quiet again as everyone maintained their footing and aim at Frank. The clacks of Emily’s boots and Jane’s heels echoed in the station as they walked up to mine and Hotch’s side. Frank looked over and smiled at Jane, but she didn’t smile back. Hotch asked his question again as Frank stood up.

“Did you not think that I’d come looking for you?” Frank addressed Jane.

Jane hid slightly behind Emily. “You killed two innocent women, Frank, and you took that little girl. Why?”

“For you, my love. Without you, I am nothing. I had to do everything I could to get you back.”

“Tracey, Frank,” Emily said, irritated with how they were dancing around the information we needed.

“Not until we’re safely away.”

“Stop it, Frank. I’m not going with you,” Jane insisted, moving behind Emily a bit more.

“Jason, wait—” Hotch pleaded with Gideon as he came running onto the platform with his weapon raised at Frank.

Both of us tried to stand in his way, but he pushed past us and stepped closer to Frank. “Sarah was a doctor,” Gideon said behind gritted teeth. So that was his date’s name. “She ran a cancer treatment center. She dedicated her life to easing the pain of others. You took the lives of hundreds all because your mother was a whore.”

Frank’s grin immediately disappeared. “You don’t know anything about my mother.”

“Mary Louise Breitkopf. An immigrant from Germany, a single mother to a son named Frank, lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Tell me, did she do it all in the house or did she at least show you the courtesy of doing it elsewhere?”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Frank hissed.

“You think that you’re special, don’t you, Frank? Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not. You’re _nothing_.”

Frank glanced over Gideon’s shoulder to look at Jane again. “Jane, this world isn’t meant for us. We don’t fit in here. We should go Come with me and we can be together forever.” Jane stepped around Emily slowly and started walking forwards. No one tried to stop her, but we were keeping a close eye to make sure that neither of them would try anything. “I love you, Jane.” He held out his hand for her.

She took his hand, “I love you, too.”

He pulled her close for a kiss, and both Emily and I stepped forward to intervene, but Hotch put an arm out to the side to stop us. The approaching train blared its horn to signal its arrival, so none of us could hear what was said between them after they parted from their kiss. The next thing we knew, Frank kissed Jane’s knuckles and they made a run for the train tracks. We all tried to run after them to grab them, but they were just too far ahead of us. Before we could stop them, both Frank and Jane jumped in front of the train.

I threw my palm to my forehead as my jaw fell and I let out a gasp. This was Frank’s endgame. He knew that we weren’t going to let him get away again, and he wanted to make sure that he was with Jane for forever, just like he said. He didn’t really care about her, though. As a psychopath, he was incapable of loving her the way she assumed he did. He just wanted one more victim to go down with him. She was supposed to be his first and only, but he couldn’t stop himself from killing, even in the end.

Gideon’s phone rang as he reholstered his weapon. I looked over at Hotch and he looked just as shocked as me. No one cared if Frank died, though it would have been nice if we could have arrested him; but Jane was just an innocent, naive, lost, and broken woman. She didn’t deserve what Frank put her through. That seemed to be Hotch’s biggest regret— not getting to help her more.

“Reid and JJ have Tracey,” Gideon told us, still on the phone. “She’s safe.”

“And Mary Breitkopf?” I asked.

Gideon shook his head, “Reid estimates that she’s been dead over twenty years.”

Frank started killing people around twenty years ago… The death of his mother— if he hadn’t killed her himself— was his stressor. He did all of this for _her_. But it was over now. Frank and Jane were gone, and they had left a trail of blood behind them; but Tracey was safe. That was a win. We failed Rebecca, but we didn’t fail that little girl or her parents.

It was over. Finally.

* * *

“Hey, Greenaway,” Morgan said as he approached my desk. “Wanna go for a drive?”

I shook my head while still collecting all of my things for the night. “Hotch and I are going to pick up Jack from his aunt’s house.”

Morgan kicked my ankle playfully to grab my attention, so I gave in and looked up at him with a glare. “I want to show you something. It’s important.”

“But Hotch—”

“I already talked to him. Trust me, it won’t take that long.”

I looked up at Hotch’s office to see that he had just finished packing up his briefcase for the night. Morgan stepped in front of my gaze and smiled at me. I rolled my eyes and gave into his offer with a silent nod. His smile widened as I got out of my seat and walked towards the glass doors of the BAU.

Morgan drove us about thirty minutes out of town to a suburban neighborhood that was in the middle of development. We pulled up to one of the houses that was practically just a skeleton with half of a roof. As Morgan put the car in park, I asked myself what the hell we were doing there. How did Morgan know about this place and what was so important to show me all the way out there?

I followed Morgan’s lead as he got out of the car and walked up to the house he had brought me to. There was no door, so we just stepped in between two beams. We ended up standing in the middle of what looked like would eventually be a living room. After a minute of me spinning around to try to figure out the significance of this place, I gave up and asked Morgan where we were and why we were there.

“You know how I own a bunch of different properties?” he asked me and I nodded. “Well, this is one of them.” That was great and all, but why were we there? “What happened to us, it doesn’t define us, but there are a lot of kids still out there who don’t know that— and a lot of them end up in the system. If there had been a place where I could have sought out help, I would have taken it, but I didn’t have anyone. We save all different kinds of kids all the time, and sometimes they end up in a system that can’t give them the help or resources they need, and I feel like I have the ability to help them, so I bought this place and I’m going to turn it into a foster home for kids who have been removed from abusive families.”

“Morgan, that’s…” I was absolutely speechless.

It was amazing. No one ever looked out for kids like us when we needed it the most. We always felt so alone and misunderstood— like somehow it was all our fault. Morgan knew that feeling better than anyone, and he took the initiative to find a place that could help kids. If I would’ve had something like that after… Well… Again, speechless. 

“Do you still have them?” he asked, referring to the pictures while pulling out something from his pocket. I nodded. He flipped open a lighter, “They don’t exist, right?” I smiled lightly as he ignited the flame. “Let’s make it official.”

I reached into my suit jacket and pulled the pictures out of the inside pocket. I kept them face down because I didn’t want either of us to look at them again. I wanted that night to be remembered for the kindness and friendship Derek Morgan showed me, not because it was the last time I ever stared at those nightmarish photos. Morgan took the photos carefully from my grip and I watched as he held one of the corners over the flame. The photos took a moment to catch on fire, but once they did, Morgan lit another corner just to make sure it would keep going and not fizzle out half way through.

When the flame got too close and hot to his fingers, Morgan dropped them on the dirt ground. We stood shoulder to shoulder in silence for a minute until I finally found the courage to say what had been on my mind all day since we found them in Rebecca’s room.

“I’m going to tell him,” I whispered as we watched the photos burn. “I’m just scared.”

“Y/N.” I looked up at him. “Hotch loves you more than anything. He’ll listen and he’ll get it. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

“I don’t want to lose him because he thinks differently of me.”

“I swear to you, if that happens, I’ll shoot him myself.”

I laughed, “Well, that’s a little hyperbolic.”

Morgan reached over with both of his arms and he enveloped me in a warm hug. “You’re going to be fine.”

I wrapped my arms around Morgan’s chest and hid my face in his shoulder, “Thank you, Morgan.”

“Anytime, sunshine.”

The small fire died out as the photos were turned to nothing but ashes. It was like they never existed, which was exactly what I wanted. No one would ever see those photos again. They weren’t even a memory, if I were being honest. It happened, I moved on, yet they were exhumed for the purpose of hurting me again, and I just needed to get over it again. Time was the best way to heal before, and it would be again… as long as I had Hotch and Jack with me every step of the way. Knowing that I wasn’t alone anymore, that someone like Morgan got it, it helped tremendously; but Morgan was right, Hotch deserved to know why I was hurting because if anyone could help ease my suffering, it was the man I loved most. I didn’t have to be alone. I didn’t have to drown in my sorrows all over again like I did after high school. I had people who loved me and wanted to help me. All I needed to do was ask.

So I asked Morgan to drive me home as fast as he could before I could change my mind about it all. I watched the moon move in the opposite direction of us as he drove me back. The stars sparkled and the wind blew in my face as I stuck my head out the window and rested it on the windowsill. It was good to appreciate the smallest things like how nice the night was when our work consisted of so many terrible things. It was easy to lose faith in humanity and life if one got too caught up in the work and ignored the good that came out of it all. For instance, without the BAU, I would have never met Hotch and Jack. Without the BAU, I wouldn’t have found the closure I needed from that night in high school.. Without the BAU, I would have never met Morgan, Emily, Reid, Garcia, or JJ. The people I held most dear wouldn’t know me without the job we had. I had so much to be grateful for, and it all came from the opportunity I was given. I had to remember that every time a case took a toll on me or anyone else.

I thanked Morgan for showing me the foster home he was building and for driving me home afterwards. He insisted that it was no problem and if I ever needed a ride again, he’d be more than happy to lend a hand. I hit his arm playfully and told him that he had to get in line behind Hotch and his gun if he were ever going to get a chance with me. Morgan laughed and threw his hands up in surrender before I thanked him again and got out of his car. I watched as he drove off into the night to head back to his own home. 

When the street was quiet, I headed into the house. The lights were off in the living room, kitchen, and dining room, but the hallway light up the stairs was on, meaning that both Hotch and Jack were upstairs. I circled back to the front door to set the alarm before heading upstairs. I dropped my bag off in the hallway just outside of Jack’s room and quietly knocked to see if he would respond. When there was no answer, I carefully opened the door to see if he was asleep or had headphones on while playing a game on his tablet. My heart melted as I saw Jack curled up under the blankets on his bed. He looked like he had been asleep for hours despite it still being fairly early in the night.

I snuck over and discreetly sat on his bed so as to not disturb him. I leaned down and kissed the top of his head, “Goodnight, little man.” I sat back up straight.

“He crashed as soon as we got home,” Hotch whispered from the doorway. “I think he had a longer day than we did.” I smirked while brushing Jack’s hair out of his face gently. “Are you okay?” he asked me. I shrugged and he tiptoed closer to me before taking a seat on the bed, too. “What’s wrong?” he snaked his arms around my waist and kissed my temple.

“I can’t get the sound of Tracey Belle’s mom crying out of my head. They were so worried about their daughter… I thought that Mrs. Belle was going to have a heart attack then and there on that sidewalk.” I sucked in a quiet but deep breath. “And all I could think about was how I’d die if anything happened to you or Jack. He doesn’t deserve the cruel touch this world can have.” I reached up to my face and wiped a tear that managed to escape before I could blink it away.

There was so much out there that Jack wasn’t prepared for, and he never would be. Hotch and I knew of every evil imaginable, it came with the territory of the job, but I never wanted Jack to have to face any of it. Worst of all, I didn’t want him to end up in a lonely situation like Tracey Belle went through… or the unthinkable, what _I_ endured.

Hotch kissed my cheek, “We’re going to be okay.” He hummed against my ear as he rocked me back and forth slightly. “I promise that nothing will ever happen to us. I swear.”

I stood from Jack’s bed, took Hotch’s hand in mine, and began to lead him towards our bedroom. He followed without arguments or playfulness like he normally would. In our bedroom, Hotch sat down on the bed while I closed the door. For a moment, I continued to face the door, my back to Hotch, my mind racing with thoughts of how I was going to approach this.

When it came to Morgan, everyone found out before he could even say anything the way he wanted to, but now I had to come up with the right words to make sense of everything for Hotch. The worst part, though, was the anxiety of not knowing how he was going to react. There weren’t many people out there who could learn about something like what I went through and then go on like nothing happened. I didn’t want things to change. I liked how Hotch and I were. I liked how he loved me when he was trying to be romantic, how he got rough when he wanted to be dominant, how he knew exactly what I wanted without even having to ask. It was our thing, and it made me happy. But people had a tendency to treat survivors like they were fragile, and I wasn’t fragile. I was more than just what happened to me. I didn’t want Hotch to be scared to do things anymore because he knew about my past. I didn’t want him to stop loving me because he might think differently of me. But Morgan had a point… Hotch would eventually find out one way or another, so it was best if I just told him.

“Baby,” he whispered from the bed.

He never called me that. It wasn’t like we didn’t want to or anything, but we just… hadn’t… so when it took me by surprise, I felt my heart and stomach do simultaneous somersaults. I didn’t want to lose him. It was my worst nightmare to have the only man I had ever loved to look at me like he was mad or disappointed. I didn’t want that. But he seemed so worried about me, obviously, or else he wouldn’t have slipped up on the name. Or maybe it wasn’t a slip up at all and he just felt like it made sense to finally say it.

“What is it?” he asked me. I turned to face him. “Is this about me jumping in the dumpster? I said I’m sorry.”

I smirked and shook off a laugh. He wanted to cheer me up and brighten the mood, and it was working, but my nerves prevented me from acting _normal_ , which only concerned him even more. So, while fidgeting with my fingers, I sat next to him on the edge of the bed while maintaining a safe distance from him. There was no doubt in my mind that Hotch was definitely profiling my behavior. I was quiet, distant, my eyes were looking anywhere but at him, and I was shaking like a chihuahua in the snow. Something was obviously wrong, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what other than the fact that what happened with Tracey Belle made me worry about Jack— but there was no reason for me to still be this worried about it when he had just calmed me down. So it was something else, he knew that much, and he was going to give me the time and space to say it however I saw fit.

“Do you remember how Randall Garner stole the jewelry box Elle gave me?” I asked quietly, still staring at the floor. I spotted Hotch nodding out the corner of my eye. “You remember I told you that there were supposed to be pictures inside—”

“I know, Y/N,” he interrupted before I could say more. I finally looked up at him with confusion plastered to my face. “Garcia found out about them, and you know how she is, she’s ridiculously protective of us all, and so she wanted to find the guy who blackmailed you, I guess. She didn’t find what the photos were, but… we connected the dots when we saw that he had at least ten other girls come forward against him, claiming that he did the same thing to all of them when he left for college.”

My eyes fell shut and I cringed. _At least_ ten other girls. It should have ended with me, right, but that wasn’t how sociopaths like him worked. One victim just wasn’t enough to quench his thirst. Frank was the same way.

“I’m so sorry, Y/N,” he took my hands.

“It was so long ago—”

“You don’t have to invalidate how you really feel about it.”

“I’m not.”

Hotch tilted his head to the side and gave me a look that said: “Seriously?” I shrugged. “Look at me,” he said before he gently grabbed my chin and made me stare at him. “What he did to you shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry that it did. But you didn’t have to be afraid to tell me and you don’t have to be scared to admit how you still feel about it. I need you to believe me when I tell you that it _wasn’t_ your fault.”

He was right. I knew it. Both Morgan and Hotch had told me practically the same things, and yet it was still hard to _believe_ them. At least this hasn’t gone as poorly as expected. I would definitely need to talk to Garcia about keeping her fast, little, hacker fingers off my past, but I was honestly glad that I didn’t have to say it. While I should have been mad at them for snooping around in business that didn’t concern them and should have been my right to tell them, it was a relief that I didn’t have to relive any of the memories by telling Hotch everything. It could just go unsaid and the healing process could begin with him by my side. 

I escaped from his touch before letting my face fall into the crook of his neck. “Please don’t treat me any differently,” I begged quietly.

“I’m not going to,” he answered quickly while petting my hair.

I grabbed onto his shirt and twisted the fabric in my hands. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.”


	18. LIFE IN SHAMBLES

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of smut. Mentions of Dom/sub relationship. I think that’s all?
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 3 Episodes 01 and 02. Two days after part seventeen.

On Monday, Aaron was supposed to meet with Strauss prior to the commencement of the unit’s evaluations. He had been so stressed about it that he didn’t even sleep the night before. I tried to stay up with him for as long as I could to make sure that he was alright, but after so long of his fingers combing my hair, exhaustion started to get the best of me. Then, when I woke in the morning, I realized that he was still holding me and playing with my hair like he didn’t even bother trying to close his eyes. I leaned up and I kissed him as lovingly as I could to let him know that I was there and that everything was going to be alright. These “evaluations” were dumb, but no one was going to lose their jobs. We weren’t going anywhere. We all loved our jobs and we all worked our asses off; Strauss would see that, I had no doubts.

Throughout the rest of our morning, he still didn’t say a word. I caught him in the bathroom looking in the mirror while he struggled to loop his tie around the same way he had been doing it every day for decades. At some point, he gave up and threw the tie into the sink, but I hurried over to rescue it and help him put it on. Before I could even tighten it around the collar of his shirt, Hotch grabbed my wrists and held me still for a moment while he got lost in my eyes. I felt at home and at peace while searching his brown eyes, and I was sure that he felt the same while getting lost in my eyes because he let out a heavy sigh that had been weighing him down. His shaky hands released my wrists so that I could finish messing with his tie. I told him to take the time he needed to get ready while I went to go wake Jack up for school.

Jack rolled over and whined about not wanting to get up. When I told him that it was either school or no ice cream in the afternoon, he hurried out of bed and ran to his closet to pick out a Batman t-shirt. As I stood to leave his room so that he could change privately, I made him promise not to tell his dad about our ice cream promise because it would get me in trouble. Jack giggled and nodded before kicking me out of his room.

Hotch was already in the living room with his briefcase in his hands, his gun holstered on his hip, and a coffee in his hands. He told me that there was a fresh pot in the kitchen if I wanted, and as I turned for the kitchen, he asked me to grab a banana for him and Jack for breakfast. I threw a thumbs up over my shoulder and in his direction before pushing through the kitchen door.

On our way out of the house, I juggled my coffee and the last three bananas we had in the kitchen while Jack ran to the car with his backpack and soccer bag, and Hotch carried my purse for me. I opened my car door and stretched head first into the vehicle to put my coffee in the cupholder and put the bananas on the armrests. Hotch snuck up behind me and put my purse on the floor in front of my seat after I moved out of the way. Jack was already sitting in his seat in the car, trying to pull the seatbelt down for himself as though to prove that he could do it for himself, but he was pulling too hard so the safety locks kept pulling against him.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I shushed, peeling his fingers off of the seatbelt. “Let’s not break the car with your Superman strength, alright?” Jack gave up and sat back in his seat. “Thank you,” I sing-songed while pulling the seatbelt down and around him with ease. When he was buckled in, I grabbed one of the bananas from the armrest. “Breakfast for my superhero in training,” I handed it over to Jack with a smile. I sat down on the edge of the car and looked up slightly at Jack. “Can you do me a favor when we get to school, little man?” He nodded. “Can you give your dad the biggest hug you can with your Superman strength when we drop you off? I think he really needs it.”

“With my Superman strength?” he clarified with a laugh.

I smiled back, “With every bit of it you have. He’s strong, just like you, so you won’t hurt him, I promise.”

Jack nodded, “Okay.” My smile widened with appreciation. “Can I give you one, too?”

I froze for a moment. “Of course you can, little man. You always can.”

“Y/N, we have to go,” Hotch warned as he slid into the driver’s seat and started the car.

I patted Jack’s knee as I stood up. After closing his door, I sat down in the passenger’s seat and we started driving towards Jack’s school. It was only a short drive through the neighborhood, then across Steerwood Boulevard, and from there we had to drive around the entire campus of the elementary and middle school buildings before pulling into the parking lot for the elementary school. Considering how early we got there, we had beat the morning rush of parents trying to get their kids to school on time so that they could make it to work before they were late. We pulled up right to the front doors, and after Hotch put the car in park, we all got back out again. Jack grabbed his stuff and stepped onto the sidewalk with me and Hotch.

When he was balancing both of his bags and his breakfast, Jack raised his arms up and out for his dad. Hotch crouched down and enveloped Jack in a hug. I watched as Jack strained to squeeze his dad as tightly as he could, just like I told him to. The smile on my face was too wide and pure to even try to hide, even when Hotch glanced up at me to raise a brow and question why Jack was hugging him so hard.

After Jack hugged his dad, he held his arms out for me. “Is it my turn for a Superman hug?” I asked while crouching down, too. Jack threw his arms around my neck and constricted them as far as he could with every ounce of strength he had available. I groaned as I hugged him back while feigning the tightest hug I could muster so that he could seem stronger than me. “Have fun at school, little man.” We let go of each other.

“You’re going to come to pick me up from soccer practice, right?” he asked me.

I nodded, “If they don’t need us to go save the world, I’ll be right here waiting for you.”

He leaned in, tripping slightly over my shoes, but I caught him. He cupped his hands over my hair and ear, and he whispered, “Ice cream after?”

I laughed as he leaned back. He looked at me with a smile and I pressed my index finger to my lips, “Shh… It’s a secret.”

Hotch raised another brow at me. “What is?”

“It wouldn’t be much of a secret if we told you, now would it?” I poked Hotch’s arm. I turned back to Jack, “School, soccer, then our secret. Got it?” Jack nodded. “Attaboy.”

“Have fun at school,” Hotch encouraged with a smile.

Jack threw his arms around his dad again for another hug, but this time it was light and brief. Before we knew it, Jack was running into the school while calling for one of his friends to wait up for him. Hotch took my hand and helped me stand up. He looked at me for a moment, his eyes searching mine, and the next thing I knew, his other hand was holding the back of my neck, and he pulled me close. Our lips pressed into a soft, gentle, loving kiss that made my stomach flutter with butterflies, and I felt like I was floating on cloud 9. Hotch and I had a tendency to let our kisses get out of hand because we practically always needed each other, but there were times like these where romance took the wheel and overwhelmed both of us. His lips were barely pressed to mine, that was how gentle the kiss was, and there wasn’t even any tongue involved. Just a sweet, gingerly placed kiss to tell me that he loves me more than life itself.

“What would I do without you?” he whispered against my lips.

“Well, you’d certainly be bored, for one.”

Hotch chuckled, “You’re not wrong.” He kissed me again, this time a little harder. “Thank you.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The hand that was clasped around mine released its grip and Hotch moved to open my car door for me. He stole another quick kiss from me using his hand that was still on my neck to pull me close again. I leaned into the kiss, pulling at the ends of his hair on the back of his neck slightly. When we parted again, I released his hair and he released my neck, then I got back into the car.

At work, the BAU was still quiet. No one but Gideon had shown up yet, and he was already locked away in his office. Since Sarah’s death, he hadn’t exactly been himself, and I didn’t blame him whatsoever. Sarah seemed to mean a great deal to him, and Frank took that away because he was a cruel, sociopathic man who wanted to see Gideon suffer. Gideon was in no way responsible for what happened to Sarah, but that didn’t mean we could stop him from blaming himself. Losing someone was always hard, but whenever it got dragged into our work, that took a toll on all of us. Gideon was already a fragile man who had been worn down by the job for decades upon decades. He had seen more evil than anyone deserved. It was a miracle that he was still with the BAU after all those years and all that pain.

Hotch dropped his stuff off in his office while I dropped mine at my desk in the bullpen. I put my purse under my desk, my coffee on a coaster next to my files, and my breakfast banana just on top of them. I took a quick seat to look over what work I had for the day if we weren’t going to be whisked away on another case by JJ.

When Hotch looked ready to walk over to Strauss’s office, I waited for him to shuffle down the ramp in front of his and Gideon’s offices, then I joined him on the walk. Neither of us said anything, which gave me a chance to watch him out the corner of my eye. He was fidgeting with the buttons on his suit jacket like he couldn’t decide if he wanted them clasped or not. In the hallway just outside of Strauss’s office, however, he immediately stopped fidgeting, so that he could fix his posture and clear his throat. He was the most poised and professional I had ever seen him before. His work professionalism and his private sophistication were entirely different, yet I never realized it until just then when we were walking in that empty hallway.

When it was just us, Hotch always seemed to _know_ that he was in charge and respected. He didn’t have to try very hard to convince me of any of that because he just carried around this spirit of sophistication, superiority, and elegance. He could send me a single, silent look, and I would immediately be on my knees for him— well, I would if I didn’t have a tendency to give him push back every now and again. But at work, despite the fact that the team respected him immensely, he still had to fight every day to earn that spirit of sophistication, superiority, and elegance with everyone else, like Strauss, for instance.

Section Chief Erin Strauss was the department’s director. While she was directly responsible for overseeing the work of unit chiefs, like Hotch, she ultimately held all of our jobs in the palm of her hand— hence the investigation into the BAU. She was the only one who could _and_ wanted to fire Hotch. Anyone higher up on the food chain could get rid of him, too, if they wanted, but she was the only one who seemed to really have it out for him. Thus why I couldn't blame him for being nervous about all of this.

Hotch stepped in my path and, before I knew it, he took my hands in his. “Y/N,” he stared down at our clasped hands, “there’s a chance I might get fired. If that happens—“

“I’ll quit,” I promised desperately, squeezing his hands.

He squinted at me, “You’ll do no such thing—“

“—Hotch—“

“That’s an order.”

“If they fire you, then your order is bullshit.”

“Then it’s a command,” his voice lowered and he said it loud enough for only me to hear. 

I swallowed hard. _Oh…_ Fair enough. He wouldn’t be able to stop me from going down with him, so he tried to be a good boss and tell me no, but when I wasn’t having any of that shit, he pulled out the dominant card and I couldn’t help but obey. I shiver ran down my spine as he continued to stare at me, a challenge to test him and see where it would get me.

“If it happens, I need you to just keep working as usual, alright?” He raised a brow, waiting for my answer. I nodded. He let out a shaky breath. “I love you.”

I squeezed his hands again, “It’ll be okay.” I jumped onto my tip-toes and kissed his cheek as quickly as I could so that no one could catch us. “I love you.”

* * *

**HOTCH’S POV**

Erin was watching me pace the width of her office in front of her desk. I was taking note of everything I could in order to keep my mind busy to avoid thinking the worst. What happened with Jason and Frank wasn’t good… And with everything else that had been stacking up against the team and against me, specifically, I knew that I was burying myself in a hole that would be impossible to climb out of. She never liked me, that much I knew. She had always been looking for ways to help bury my career, and in the past I had been so careful to never trip up, but recently, with everything that had been going on, there were more than a handful of reasons to fire me.

After watching me pace for another few minutes, Erin reclined in her chair and asked, “What happened on Friday after Agent Gideon called you?”

There was a lot that happened after we got off the phone with Jason… A lot more than Erin likely cared to know about— and a lot more would have happened, too, if we hadn’t gotten that call when we did. Y/N had every reason to be upset that we got interrupted. Every time we had some time to ourselves, it seemed like it was always cut short because of work, and it was wearing us both out. When I was still with Haley, she had given up on being frustrated with it to the point that we didn’t even argue again until the night she left. Our relationship had come to this boring cycle of not even trying to love or fight, and what was the point of that? But with Y/N, we didn’t feel the need to fight, but when we did, it almost felt like a relief. We didn’t technically have an argument that night, but the fact that they were frustrated with me was a good sign that we weren’t turning out to be exactly how Haley and I ended, and that was a comfort that I could live with.

I knew that no matter what, though, everything I answered had to be about _me_ and no one else. Strauss was looking for every reason to fire me, and that was fine because I knew how to handle it, but she was also investigating the team, which I couldn’t have. They needed each other, so any blame that could possibly be put on them needed to rest on my shoulders to ensure that I was the only one facing the consequences. So when Strauss asked what happened after the call, I chose my next words carefully.

“I received a call around 7:30PM, telling me that my team was being called in to help consult on a case. At the time, I did not know that it had anything to do with Agent Gideon. When I arrived at his apartment, I spoke with the other unit chief that was already there to lead the investigation. I was told that my team had been called in for questioning, and that was it. A few minutes later, I received a call from Agent Gideon from a payphone. He explained his innocence to me and said that he saw the Unsub running away from the crime scene, so he pursued the man, but was unable to catch him.”

“The Unsub was Frank Breitkopf?”

I nodded, “Yes, ma’am. Agent Gideon told us where we could find the evidence to prove that it was Frank who killed the victim in his apartment. I found the evidence in a dumpster and turned it over to the forensics team.”

“Why did you and your team not just head home after that since you were not on the case?”

“My team is the only one that dealt with Frank in the past. We knew who he was and what he was capable of. I felt that there was no time to explain everything we knew to the local authorities or the unit assigned to the case because the profile that I had of Frank led me to believe that he would kill again as soon as possible. There was no time to waste, so I made the decision that we would try to find him as quickly as possible in order to prevent another death.”

“But you didn’t prevent that,” she said demeaningly.

I hesitated while searching her eyes. Yes, we weren’t able to stop Frank before he killed Rebecca Brian; but we were able to save Tracey Belle later on, and that was a win, wasn’t it? 

“If we’re being honest, Aaron, the evaluations of your team were more of a courtesy to you because I think we both knew that this was inevitable; and we’ve been friends for awhile, and I didn’t want to embarrass you by making this meeting obvious.” Erin sat forward in her chair and rested her forearms on her desk. “But I believe that you are no longer effective in your position at the BAU.”

I slightly fixed my posture as I sucked in a steady breath. I thought that this could happen. I told Y/N that it was a possibility, yet I still didn’t want to believe it. I knew that I was good at my job— the entire team did, too. Erin never went out into the field, she didn’t know what it took to run a team like ours and the kind of choices I had to make. If she were there, things would have ended a lot worse than they did. We had won. Frank was dead and Tracey was found. How was that not a win in her eyes? She would have let Tracey die just to arrest Frank, I had no doubts. That wasn’t what I considered to be a win. Saving the innocent over the broken was my priority, therefore I did my job.

She didn’t think that I was effective in my position anymore? Or she didn’t trust my integrity? There was no doubt in my mind or from anyone else in my unit that I knew how to do my job, and I knew how to do it well. I had been profiling and working with the BAU for _years_ , and yet, suddenly, when things were looking up for me and my family, there were questions being thrown around. Erin wanted to know just how effective I was? Fine. Maybe taking a page from Y/N’s book wasn’t the best idea, but they always knew when they were on thin ice and they knew when to keep pushing anyways in order to prove a point. Erin wanted me to back down, but I had someone I loved dearly waiting out in that hallway for me to prove that I wasn’t going to back down, not when it came to the job I loved so much. So I did what Y/N would do. I pushed to make my point.

“The modern furniture in your office, the strategically placed magazines, the framed diplomas, the art on the walls, they’re all in conflict with your family photos. You have three children, but you favor one, your son. Like any parent, you, of course, love all of your children, but not like your son.”

“That’s enough,” she insisted.

But I didn’t relent, “The bonsai you obsessively nurture is to compensate for the failure you feel as a parent—”

“Agent Hotchner!” she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “I am not the one in question here. It is _you_. I doubt that you can continue to lead your team.”

“My team? Let me tell you about my team. Agent Morgan fought to protect his identity and his secrets from the very people who could save him because he knows that trust needs to be earned. There are only a few people whom he wholeheartedly trusts, and I know that includes the entirety of my team now. Reid’s intellect is what shields him from his own emotions. At this very moment, his shields are still under repair, but he’s getting better because he’s a strong man who loves his job and the people he works with. Prentiss overcompensates because she doesn’t yet feel like she’s a part of the team— which is how they all start out, Agent Greenaway included. Greenaway has worked harder to get where they are today than I’ve seen out of anyone on my team. They fought for their position and they even surprised Agent Gideon and myself, which is no easy task. They’re strong, independent, brave; yet still the most empathetic member of my team, which makes them such a lovely person to work with. Agent Jareau works every day, tirelessly, to find us assignments so that we can help more people; and she goes home every night, praying that she made the right choice. Without her, our team would be ultimately useless. Without her, we would be running around like a group of headless chickens, waiting for something to fly across our desks. Garcia is the brightest soul I have ever met, and she reflects that in the decor of her office in order to remind herself that there is light in the darkness as she stares at her computers all day, dissecting the horrific images and evidence we send her. And Agent Gideon, in many ways, is doomed by the knowledge he has collected over his impressively long career. He is the best of us, but he’s also the most broken. But that’s what inspires him to keep working as hard as he does.

I know that my ability to profile isn’t in question. I know that my position in the BAU wasn’t even questioned until I began to publicly date Y/N, but… you know what? I love them and I don’t regret any of it for a single second. I stand by my actions. I stand by my team. And if you can find another person who can run my team better than me, good luck.”

There. I did it. Maybe it would get me fired, maybe it would save my job. I didn’t care either way because I knew that I did what I felt was right and I did all that Y/N could ask me to do: fight. They told me that they would fight for us, and I knew that I would do the same— but my job was just as important as my family, and I couldn’t stand by and not fight. What kind of a man would I be if I didn’t fight for what I believe in?

“Aaron,” she stood from her seat after I turned to leave. I stopped and looked back at her. “How—”

“How did I know that you favor your son?” I raised a brow. “Because I’m good at my job.”

As I made my way out of her office, she fell entirely silent. I smirked to myself because it felt good to finally give her a piece of my mind. Y/N stood just to my left, their back pressed against the wall, their arms crossed over their chest, their foot tapping nervously against the marble floor. When they spotted me, their tapping stopped and their face brightened. I swear, I could look at them all day and I’d still never get tired of it. Every time I looked at them, it felt like the first time, and I always fell in love all over again. I never wanted to stop falling in love with them every chance I got. I wanted them to always smile at me like that because their happiness never failed to inspire my heart to skip a beat. 

“How did it go?” they asked me.

“Well, I’m not fired yet,” I smiled, trying to break the tension ever so slightly.

“But?” they egged on.

“I’m on thin ice. She’s not happy with me.”

“I don’t understand.” They pushed themselves off the wall and neared me. “What did she say? Why is this happening?”

I put my hands on their shoulder to comfort them. “Try not to worry about, okay? The good news is that I’m still here and we have work to do.”

“Hotch—”

“Trust me, Y/N. Please.” I slid my hands down their arms and took their hands. “I’ve got it handled.” I released one hand and started gently guiding them back towards the office.

“I trust you,” they said with a relaxed tone while tugging on my hand to make me stop walking. I turned back to them and let them pull me back to their side. “But I need you to be honest with me so that I don’t worry to death. Please.”

Their puppy-dog pleading eyes always got to me, even if they didn’t realize it. Whenever they looked at me like that, it reminded me of the innocence they still held inside themselves despite how hard they tried to hide and suppress it. They always wanted to prove themselves to me and everyone at work, and they did so by always acting strong and unbreakable. They liked to be snarky, to take initiative, and to challenge Spencer’s intellect, even though they really couldn’t. But underneath all of that, when they peeled away a mask just for me, they were still snarky and bratty, but there was a kind of tenderness that made my heart melt. They knew exactly when to give me push back, and they knew when I needed the comfort of their words, touch, or kisses. It was like they knew everything about me before I even knew it— and those damn eyes… They were so bright and full of life and love. Every time they looked at me, I could tell exactly what they were feeling and thinking. If they were sad or happy, it was always in their eyes. When they were desperate and needy, it was in their eyes. When they were in need of my comfort or in need of space, it was in their eyes. And when they looked at me just then while pleading for answers, I knew that they were struggling to comfort and support me while wrestling with the fact that they were being kept in the dark about our future at the BAU.

I accepted that they wouldn’t stop prying for answers, because it was in their nature to fight for what they thought was important— which included fighting for me when necessary. Since they weren’t going to stop prying and they weren’t going to be able to focus on work, I had to give in and just tell them. I didn’t want to keep secrets from them, anyways. Secrets and miscommunication was a large part of why Haley and I failed, and I wasn’t about to make that mistake again with the one person who made me feel like _me_.

“She doesn’t think that I’m capable of doing my job anymore, so I profiled her to prove a point.”

Y/N’s eyes shot wide, “You didn’t.”

I smiled slightly and nodded, “Yeah, I did. It worked, I guess, ‘cause she was impressed enough to let me leave her office with my job still, so,” I shrugged. “But we have to be careful right now. I don’t want to give her any reason to pull me back in for a meeting.”

“I can do careful,” Y/N nodded. “It’ll be sexy,” they winked. “It’ll be like keeping us a secret all over again. You remember those blissful months?”

There they were. That was why I fell in love with them.

“Not being able to touch you in front of people when we first started dating,” I whispered while running my hands up and down their shoulders and biceps, “it was torture.”

“But it made you want me more, remember?”

They had a point. “It’ll be torture all over again.”

“But the sex after work will be amazing,” they bit their lip.

I hated when they did that. It drove me absolutely wild to see that they were holding something back from me in the most seductive way they could think of. They always bit their lip when they wanted to hold back moans, or to stop themselves from screaming my name as I thrust myself into them over and over, or when I had given them a command and they wanted to be obedient for me. Watching them bite their lip now when I had just told them that it would be absolute torture to not think about pushing them against my desk in my office and fuck them until their knees were weak… They were playing a dangerous game with me, and they certainly knew it.

“Don’t make this any harder,” I begged, trying to distract myself.

“You already do that yourself.”

If there were any way for me to turn back time in order to not say anything at all about us not being allowed to be near each other, I would have jumped at the opportunity before dragging them into the nearby bathroom and fucking them up against the wall.

The door opened and I looked to see Erin stepping out. I gulped, thinking that she had changed her mind and was coming out to collect my I.D. and gun. “Chief Strauss—“ I started to make my apology, but she held up a hand to silence me, so I decided to stop and listen.

* * *

**READER’S POV**

The office door that Hotch had just slammed behind him suddenly reopened. Hotch and I took a step back from each other as he looked up to see what was going on. I kept my eyes on him to get a read for what he was feeling or thinking. I couldn’t have cared less about Strauss or what she was doing. If there was a chance that the next few moments were going to break him, I wanted to know immediately before he could try to mask it.

“Chief Strauss—” Hotch began like he was going to explain something.

“I’m not here for you, Aaron,” Strauss said calmly. My brows wrinkled together as I turned my head over my shoulder to get a look at her. “Agent Greenaway,” she curled her finger towards herself, beckoning me into her office.

I stared at Hotch with wide, worried eyes. Why did she want to talk to me? Was this a part of my evaluation? Technically it wasn’t supposed to start until later, at 10AM, when we were supposed to start actually working on cases, even though everyone usually showed up around 8 or 9 of their own volition. But she wanted to meet with me privately after Hotch just gave her a whole profile on her own life, which probably wasn’t anything that made her too happy with either of us considering she saw us as one person, apparently. 

“Go,” Hotch nodded. “I’ll be in my office when you’re done.”

I tried to calm the panic in my stomach and chest as I whispered that I love him. He smiled like he wanted to say it back, but Strauss was still watching. More than anything else in the world, I just wanted Hotch to be able to look me in the eyes at that moment, hold my hands as tightly as he could, tell me that he loves me, and then kiss all of my worries away. But Strauss, the bitch herself, knew that if she looked away for even a moment, that was exactly what would happen, and she wasn’t about to allow that.

I joined Strauss in her office, closing the door behind me while she took a seat. I kept standing, though, even as I approached her desk and she offered me a seat. This wasn’t a casual conversation, and I definitely didn’t feel comfortable sitting down when my bouncing leg and tapping fingers would be obvious. When standing, I wouldn’t be able to bounce my knee and I could hide my fidgeting hands behind my back, so that was exactly what I did.

“Is this about my evaluation, ma’am?” I inquired.

Strauss nodded, “Yes. I’ve already evaluated your performance and I’ve come to a decision.”

I raised a brow. Weren’t the evaluations supposed to _start_ on Monday, not be completed by then? How could she already have come to a conclusion when we technically didn’t have a case and not once had she seen my performance in the field with her own eyes. It was one thing to talk about me as an agent in a report, but it was entirely different to see the effort I put into what I do. There was absolutely no way she already came to a conclusion about me as a person or an agent when we hadn’t even met before.

“Based on the information I’ve been given, I’ve decided that you are going to be suspended until our committee can complete a code of conduct review.”

“Based on the information you have been given?” I scoffed. “Ma’am, what information might that be?” I was trying so hard to bite my tongue. This whole thing was absolutely preposterous. I hadn’t done anything wrong. This was so… _infuriating_. There was no basis for her suspending me.

“As I understand it, you and Agent Hotchner have been _together_ for a lengthy amount of time, and I believe that it is interfering with your ability to do your job.”

My eyes shot wide. “Ma’am, I can assure you that Agent Hotchner and I do everything in our power to separate our relationship from our work. I try very hard to not let my emotions get in the way, and I have thus far been successful. Where did you get this _information_?”

“Are you questioning me, Agent Greenaway?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am.” I nodded. “You have never once seen me work in the field and you have never even asked to talk to me or my team about my performance in the field. I doubt you know anything about how hard I work in the BAU.”

“Agent Greenaway—”

“I have never seen a unit work harder than ours. We love our jobs and we want to help as many people as we can. Agent Hotchner and I both understand that putting our feelings to the side is of the utmost importance in order to solve the cases as quickly as possible in order to save more lives. We both are extremely professional people and we wouldn’t dream of letting our relationship interfere with any case. Ever.”

Okay, so there was that time on the plane to St. Louis… And there was the fact that we were both very protective of each other since dating… _But_ … She didn’t know any of that. And she never needed to. Everyone has some slip ups, Hotch and I were no different. We weren’t robots. We were real human beings that had feelings, so it was entirely fair for us to worry subconsciously. That being said, Strauss was acting like Hotch and I were fucking on every desk in the office, we weren’t coming into work on time, we were making out during cases— or whatever one could assume. There was absolutely no proof of any of this kind of behavior, and the fact that she dodged my question about where her proof came from only solidified my suspicions.

“Frankly, you need to be more focused in the field. From what I’ve read in every case report since you and Agent Hotchner began… well... whatever it is you two are doing—”

“ _Dating_ , Chief Strauss. We’re dating. And we’re very happy.”

Strauss smiled sourly. “Right, of course. Every report since then has led me to believe that your relationship comes before the cases. Being a part of a team means working as a team, not as partners. Therefore, until the committee can conclude that your conduct is up to the Bureau’s standards, I’m suspending you from further duty without pay. You’ll have to go home immediately and you won’t be asked back until we make a decision.”

I could feel my blood boiling. All this time I had been worrying that it would be Hotch’s job on the line, and I was fully committed to the idea of quitting if he were to get fired— but I never in a million years saw _this_ coming. Afterall, I had done nothing wrong. There was no reason for me to suspect that I would have been the one to lose my job. 

There were a million and one things I wanted to say to that woman, and there were even more possibilities of what I could do to her, but I knew better. All she was doing was suspending me, not firing me. There was still a chance that the committee could conclude that I was good at my job— which _I was_ — and I’d be back before I even knew it. If I said anything rude or humiliating towards Strauss, though, I could kiss my career at the FBI goodbye. So I just had to give in. I needed to just bite my tongue as I pulled my badge and gun out and put them on her desk.

“I trust that you and the committee will do your due diligence,” I hissed behind gritted teeth. My jaw clenched as I held back every curse word imaginable.

“We’ll be giving you a call when we’ve made our decision,” she said to me as she took my credentials and weapon and put them in a drawer in her desk.

I took a few steps away from her desk. “It was nice meeting you, Chief Strauss.” I nodded my head slightly before turning and leaving the room in a cool, calm, and collected manner.

When I made it into the hallway and her office door closed behind me, I took a moment to just stand still and comprehend what the hell just happened. After everything, this was how it was going to end. I told Hotch— I _promised_ Hotch while looking him directly in the eye that nothing was going to happen, yet there we were, just not in the way we anticipated. Whatever Hotch said to her during their meeting convinced her to not suspend or fire him on the spot, but it sure as hell pissed her off enough to get rid of me. If she couldn’t get rid of SSA Aaron Hotchner, she was going to take out the next best thing: me.

I wiped my face with both of my palms to get rid of the redness and the tears welling in my eyes. There was still an entire walk of shame that I needed to make through the BAU and the rest of the building before I could get to the car and go home. While I wanted to go entirely undetected, I knew that Hotch or someone else on the team was bound to notice me as I was grabbing my purse from my desk, so all I could do was keep my head down and hope that no one would say anything to me.

As I walked down the hallway towards the BAU, I could hear Morgan laughing with JJ and Emily as they all gave Reid a hard time about something he must have said that was entirely dorky, as usual. I tried my best to not think about how I was going to miss that banter every day. I stepped into the bullpen, my head down just like I planned on, and I made a B-line straight for my desk. I leaned down and grabbed my purse from under my desk. I made sure to stand in a certain spot so that no one else in the bullpen could see me as I packed up a report I had been working on, along with a picture of me and Jack that was next to my computer, and a silly bobblehead pen that Garcia got for me after she found out that Hotch and I were dating. I hid everything in my purse then quickly threw it over my shoulder and made a step towards the door.

“Hey, Greenaway!” Morgan called. I stopped in my tracks and screwed my eyes shut as I cringed. “Reid says that, back in his prime, Hotch was definitely a bigger player than I am now. What do you think, since you’re somewhat of an Aaron Hotchner expert.”

I sucked in a breath before deciding to just keep walking as fast as I could with my back turned to them.

“Y/N!” Hotch shouted from his office since Morgan’s dumb question couldn’t catch my attention. I didn’t stop, though. I pushed right through the glass door and ran into the open elevator before the doors closed. I turned around and pressed the ground floor button before looking up to see Hotch running after me. “Y/N!” He pushed past Anderson who was walking into the BAU with coffee and breakfast for himself and a friend. “Hold the elevator!” he begged me as the elevator doors started closing. “What happened?” He stopped running as the doors closed in his face and I started descending to the lobby.

When the doors reopened, I made my way straight past security, out the front doors, and into the parking lot. Hotch and I had parked a few rows back, but with how frazzled I was, I couldn’t remember which damn spot I was looking for, all of the cars looked the fucking same. I panicked while trying to find my car keys in my purse. I clicked the unlock button a few times before catching a glimpse of the car’s lights flashing and the alarm beeping shortly. I sighed slightly with relief as I speed walked through the parking lot and towards our car.

“Y/N!” Hotch called after me again as I opened the car door. “Where are you going?” He asked, slowing down from the run he took to meet me outside.

I threw my purse into the car and looked up at him. “I’ve been suspended.”

“What?”

“Strauss said that they’re going to review my conduct as an agent because they think that our relationship is affecting my work.”

“She can’t do that. Our relationship is protected by agent guidelines. She can’t suspend you for that.”

“She can if she thinks I’m not doing my job correctly because of it.”

“Y/N…” he cooed, approaching me. I wiped away the tears from my eyes before he could get too close to see. “It should have been me.”

“No. It shouldn’t have been either of us, but Strauss is on a witch hunt. All you need to do right now is focus on the tea. Focus on doing your job and proving her wrong.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Stop saying that. Please.” I put my hand on the car door and turned slightly so that I could just get into the car as fast as possible when I wanted to. “I’ll pick up Jack from soccer after school. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

He took a step towards me with his hand raised like he was going to cup my face, but I took a step away from him and turned so that his attempt wouldn’t be handled with ease. He hesitated to move or breathe as he registered my response and what he was supposed to do in order to comfort me. There was nothing he could do. I didn’t want him to worry about me, so I was bottling everything up and insisting that he give me space— even though, deep down, I really just wanted him to hold me in his arms while I cried for hours. Was that dramatic of me? Probably. But it was how I felt, and I couldn’t change that. He said it himself, though, after he came out of Strauss’s office, we needed to keep our distance, even if I technically wasn’t currently on the team.

“Please don’t tell Jack,” I told Hotch quietly while sitting down in the car.

He caught the door before I could close it on him. “I’ll come home as fast as I can.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

I nodded and closed the door.

* * *

I had never been in the house alone before. Since first coming to Hotch’s house— which was the night after he asked me out, since he insisted on being a proper gentleman after the first date— I had never once been left alone to do whatever I wanted. Hotch was with me the majority of the time since our schedules were identical, but if there were times that he was out to get something at the store or something like that, Jack was at least home with me. Now, I had no one to keep me company and absolutely nothing to do. Sure, I snuck home one of the reports I had been working on, but what good was that going to do when I immediately ran upstairs the second I got home to throw on one of Hotch’s old college sweatshirts that he had hiding in the back of his closet, and he thought I didn't know about, then collapsed on the couch in the living room under a blanket. I wasn’t in any state to do work. I wasn’t in any kind of state to do anything but lay down and watch TV, realistically.

That was another bizarre thing about the day. Since moving in with Hotch, most of the movies we watched were kids movies because of Jack, or some older movies, like Goonies, for Hotch. Now that it was just me, I got to pick whatever I wanted, and, of course, I was drawn to whatever was saddest. While that sounded absolutely depressing— which, I guess it was— it was also kind of a relief. How often did I get to just lay around and do what I wanted? I mean, since I started going out with Hotch, everything was about work and spending my energy on making sure that Hotch and Jack knew how much I loved them. And, don’t get me wrong, I loved that my life had brought me to this point, because I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, but there were definitely times where I missed going home to my quiet apartment and I could just do whatever I wanted. So I tried to use the day I had to myself to watch what I wanted and to cry however hard I wanted because there was no one there to stop me or make me feel embarrassed about it.

A few hours later, the front door’s lock started to jingle as Hotch messed around with getting the key in the hole outside. In a hurry, I sat up straight, wiped my face clean with my palms, wiped my nose with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and pulled my blanket over my now crossed legs. I pressed my back against the back cushions of the couch as I paused the movie I was watching, and then I just waited for Hotch to push into the house.

When he finally got the door to budge, I heard him stop in his tracks shortly because he got a first glimpse at the back of my head. Then I heard him place his keys down on the table next to the door before he closed and locked it behind him. He was home earlier than expected, and still an hour before Jack would get out of soccer… A sniffle unwillingly escaped me as I thought about dreading having to put on a smile for Jack and make it seem like everything was okay, when it was far from okay. How was I supposed to tell him that my superhero duties were being put on pause? Because if I didn’t tell him the truth, then he would certainly start asking about why I wasn’t going with his dad to work everyday. Another silent sob broke through as I wiped my nose with my sleeve again.

“Baby,” Hotch whined after dropping his things at the door. He jogged over and fell to his knees on the carpet, his hands on my thighs, his soft eyes staring up into my foggy ones. “I am _so_ sorry.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I shrugged with a faux smile. “I’m fine. This is fine. See, I’m smiling.” I smiled as wide as I could for about five seconds before falling apart again. A sob left my throat and Hotch sat up on his knees to embrace me. I hid my face in the crook of his neck after dropping my hold on the blanket and wrapping my arms around him. “This is so fucking dumb…”

“I know,” he cooed calmly, “I know.”

“There’s literally nothing we can even do. That’s the worst part.”

Hotch pulled me carefully off of the couch and slid me onto his lap. He cradled me as I continued to cry. I hated being that upset about the suspension, but my job was everything to me. I had been working tirelessly for decades to get to where I was in my career, and with a snap of Strauss’s fingers, it was gone. No warning, no legitimate reason, no investigation. Just… gone… And now I was expected to sit at home and do nothing until they would ultimately tell me that I was done at the FBI. I would get the call soon and they would tell me that I need to turn over any work I had going on, I would be watched by security and my friends as I would be made to clean out my desk for real this time, and I would never get to profile another case in my life. All because Strauss had it out for Hotch because… what? She was jealous that he was better than her? She was scared that he would surpass her because he was good at his job? Honestly, I fucking hoped it happened soon. I hoped with everything I had that Hotch’s dream of being the Director of the FBI would be soon realized and he could fire her and ruin her career. She fucking deserved it.

“Worst comes to worst,” Hotch brushed my hair with his fingers, “they just transfer you out of the BAU.”

“Or they fire me.”

“They won’t.”

“You don’t know that, Aaron.”

He fell silent because he knew that I was right. There was absolutely no way he could know that for sure. Strauss wanted Hotch gone, right? And if she couldn’t do it directly, she figured that getting rid of me would result in Hotch putting in his notice— but he was smarter than that. I threatened to quit for him if it came down to it, but he would never in a million years return the favor, and I didn’t blame him. My dream was to be a profiler in the BAU, and I had gotten there. I didn’t care about any potential promotions, especially since I loved my position within the team. But Hotch had bigger dreams. He wanted to keep climbing the ladder, and there was no way in hell I’d ever let him give that up just because Strauss was being the worst.

“Just try to relax,” he begged quietly, still holding me tight and rocking me somewhat. He stretched to look over his shoulder to get a look at what I was watching before he came home. A small chuckle escaped him, “Were you watching Marley and Me?”

I let out a mixed sound of a laugh and a sob as I lied, “No.”

“There are a thousand other sad movies for you to watch, and you chose Marley and Me?” He was purposefully giving me a hard time because he knew that it would cheer me up; and even though it was working, I didn’t want to let him know it. He kissed my shoulder as the mood got serious again. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too,” I mumbled into his neck. 

He adjusted his hold on me so that he could get a better look at me. “Are you wearing my college sweatshirt?” I hid my smile from him as he squeezed me in his arms again. “It’s cute on you.”

“Even when covered in tears?”

“Well, it’s washable.”

I hit his arm playfully, “Shut up.”

“You asked!”

“And you’re supposed to say, ‘yes, Y/N, you always look gorgeous’.”

“You do always look gorgeous, why do I have to tell you that when you’re just going to pretend like you don’t believe me?” I hit his arm again. “Hey!” he laughed. He kissed my shoulder and neck again and again until it started to tickle and I let out a laugh. “There you are,” he cooed, letting up on his game before I could kick my way out of his arms.

We stayed like that for the rest of the hour, only moving every so often when Hotch needed to adjust, like when he needed to move from sitting on his knees to his butt. But he held me the entire time, refusing to let go, even when my arms slid off his neck as I started falling asleep. I had been crying for so long that any energy I had left was spent on trying to stay awake for Hotch, but exhaustion got the better of me, and I didn’t even realize it until I woke up in our bed and it was already night time. I panicked, jumping out of bed as fast as I could, and raced downstairs, nearly tripping over one of Jack’s toys that he had left out.

I groaned as I caught my footing, “Fuck—”

“Y/N said a bad word!” I heard from the dining room.

I looked around the corner and into the dining room to see Hotch sitting at the table with Jack as they were working together on some homework. Hotch was biting a knuckle to stop himself from laughing, and Jack was pointing a finger right at me.

“Does that mean I get double of my secret?” he asked me.

Shit. I had totally forgotten. Not only did I fall asleep, but I hadn’t picked up Jack from soccer like I promised, and now he was asking for more ice cream, of all things. I had really dug myself into a hole after all this time of rewarding him with ice cream as our little secret in order to push Hotch’s buttons. It started as a joke, alright. Hotch told me not to do it, and when he tells me not to do something, I’ve got to do it anyways! But now it had spiraled away from a joke and I was single handedly going to be responsible for Jack’s addiction to sugar. Great. Just great. That was just one more thing to add to my shit list for the year.

“Sorry, bud, no,” I shook my head, stepping into the dining room and making my way around the table. I put my hands on Jack’s head before planting a kiss on his hair. “But I’ll get you one scoop after you finish your homework.”

“Oh—” Hotch realized what the secret was. “No, no, no,” he began insisting. I lifted my lips and hands from Jack’s head and stepped around his chair in order to get to Hotch’s. I turned and slowly sat down on Hotch’s lap as he moved back from the table a bit to accomodate me. “You can’t keep—” I grabbed Hotch’s face between my hands and kissed him. “I’m serious—” he tried to say when we parted for air, but I immediately kissed him again. “Y/N—” I kissed him again. “Fine.”

I smiled and patted his shoulders. “What are we working on, little man?” I asked Jack.

“Math. We’re learning multiplication.”

“Is dad helping you?”

“He’s trying,” Jack shrugged, putting his pencil back to his paper.

Hotch scoffed quietly, his jaw falling to the floor. I leaned over the table, moving my hips around on Hotch as I tried to get a better look at what Jack was working on. Hotch exhaled through his nose and grabbed my hips as I settled. While I hadn’t meant anything by the movements, I wasn’t opposed to torturing him like that. We both knew that we had to remain entirely innocent around Jack, but the fact that Hotch had reacted and was likely dreaming of what he wanted to do to me… that was sufficient enough for me.

* * *

On Wednesday, I woke up to an empty bed that had been made around me. The drapes were still drawn to protect me from the sun, but our bedroom door was wide open, a sign that Hotch had taken Jack to school hours ago so there was no need for privacy. That was how I had been waking up for the past couple of days. A cold, dark, empty house with no one to greet me with a good morning kiss or hug. Hell, I even missed racing around to get ready on time with Hotch and Jack because that was just what we were used to, and it always felt good when things were normal. But now everything was so out of place.

The worst part, though, was how Hotch had to go on a case for the past two days, and he only got back late last night as I was falling asleep. After Monday night, Hotch and I got ready like we were going to drop Jack off at school and then head off to work, but the second we were back in the car after saying goodbye to him, Hotch drove me back home and I got back into another one of Hotch’s old sweatshirts, which happened to be my new favorite thing. I didn’t like laying around all day, doing absolutely nothing while the team was out who knew where, doing who knew what. Hotch could have been dead for all I knew. And I kept asking myself if that was how Haley felt when they were still together. Did she mope around all day, worried sick about him, and then there was a brief moment of relief when he would call from the jet to say that he was okay, but when he would come home and everything would fall apart, the cycle would repeat? I didn’t want us to turn into that.

When he came home, though, long after I picked Jack up from school— and, yes, I did still lie to Jack about why his father and I had only been “gone for one day” and that Hotch was “still at the office” when I went to pick him up— Hotch crawled into bed with me as fast as possible and held me as tight as he could for as long as possible. I didn’t ask about work, and he didn’t tell me anything. We just laid in silence as he kissed my neck over and over again until we finally both fell asleep.

But he left in the morning and took Jack without waking me up. I figured that he must have lied and told Jack that I wasn’t feeling well or something since I still didn’t want Jack to know about the suspension. I just wasn’t quite ready to admit that I wasn’t his Wonder Woman anymore.

I rolled out of bed, planting my feet on the wood floor before even sitting up straight. Before heading downstairs, I made sure to make my side of the bed since Hotch had gone out of his way to make his side despite the fact that I was still sleeping. I then made my way to the kitchen while rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

Hotch had made a pot of coffee before leaving the house, it seemed, but I had all the time in the world to make something more for my breakfast besides just a cup of coffee and a fruit or granola bar. For once, I could just make whatever I wanted without having to worry about if Jack would eat it or if it sounded good to Hotch, too. Shit, I missed avocado toast. Hotch thought it was too “millenial” for his taste, and Jack hated avocados with a passion, so I was left to eat them whenever I wanted to snack on chips and guacamole while working late in the office upstairs occasionally, or when they were eating popcorn during movies and I wanted something that wouldn’t get stuck between my teeth. But avocado toast… with tomato, an egg, and goat cheese… Hotch and Jack were missing out, and they had no clue. So for once since moving in with them, I grabbed everything I needed to make avocado toast, and I laid it out on the kitchen island.

After throwing on an apron, I grabbed a bowl from one of the cabinets above the sink, and a sharp knife from the knife rack for the avocados. When I set those down, I reached over to the radio on the windowsill behind the sink and started channel surfing for something of interest. It was 45 minutes into the hour, which meant that most channels were already playing ads, but there was the one station that Hotch liked that played continuous, uninterrupted music on Wednesdays. When I found it, I cheered when I heard the opening notes of Bohemian Rhapsody. There was something about that song and how much Hotch and I enjoyed it. Though there was an age difference between us, it never really affected our relationship— but there was something about that song and how it brought everyone together, regardless of age. Even Jack liked it. No matter what mood we were in, no matter what we were doing, if Bohemian Rhapsody came on, it was time to stop, dance, and sing.

So when I started halving the avocados on the kitchen island, I started dancing and singing, too. There was no one to watch me, no one to stop me, no one to make fun of my shit dancing… no one to hold my hand as we danced around the house like total maniacs… But I didn’t let that get me down. I peeled and pitted the halved avocados, then threw them in the bowl one by one. I washed my hands in order to get rid of the avocado residue that had stuck to me, all while singing “Galileo” at the top of my lungs. When my hands were clean and dried, I went back over to the bowl and started mashing and mixing.

“Bismillah! No!” I sang, holding the handle of the masher up to my mouth like a microphone. “We will not let you go! Let him go!”

“At least there’s a bright side to the morning I’ve had,” Hotch said from the doorway behind me.

I jumped out of my own skin, grabbing the knife next to me before turning around. When I realized that it was just Hotch, I sighed with relief and lowered my weapon. “Jesus, Aaron, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry,” he apologized.

I turned back to the counter and put the knife back down before continuing to smash the avocados. Then I realized who I saw and why that was odd. I froze, thought for a moment, and turned around. “Why are you home?”

Hotch peeled off his jacket and hung it where my apron would normally go just so that he could free up his hands. “Strauss suspended me, too.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head and sniffled. I dropped what I was doing, wiped my hands on my apron before quickly tearing it off my body, then hurried over to him. Just as I had done only a few days prior when he caught me after I found out about suspension. Hotch tried to wipe away any tears that were forming so as to protect me from seeing him like that. I felt my knees go weak and my heart break into a million different pieces in my chest— so much so that my whole body started to ache. Neither of us said anything as I snaked my arms around his chest and held him gently but with slight, loving pressure. His arms winged around my shoulders and he hugged me with the same amount of comfort.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, even though I knew he wasn’t.

“I will be…” he answered as honestly as he could, “as long as we stay like this for a while.”

“What did she say?”

“It was about the case I came home from last night.”

“You didn’t get a chance to tell me about it—”

“I know,” he nodded. “The Unsub, he played it smart, asked for a lawyer who got him out of custody because we had no physical evidence linking him to the crimes yet… and when he went free, a crazed student on the campus who was a fan of his, I guess, killed him and then herself. Strauss blames me because I made the call to move in too late… It was just the nail in the coffin for me, I suppose.”

“That’s total bullshit,” I said roughly. I knew that he wasn’t looking to have me rile him up since he was just trying to come to terms with it; but there was just something about Erin Strauss and how she annoyed the living hell out of me. “You made the best call you could have, I’m sure.”

“ _I did_ ,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t matter when you have to give a report to the Director that says I let a college student kill our lead suspect and then committ suicide.”

I peeled his arms off of my shoulders and released my hold on his body. I forgot about everything I was doing in the kitchen and silently started making my way back upstairs. I had enough of this, I really did. Strauss wanted Hotch gone, and she was using me as a pawn. If she didn’t have me, all she had was that he made “one bad call” after millions of good calls. The Director loved Hotch. If Strauss went with that reason to the committee and the Director, she would be laughed at— she knew that. But if she went in with the fact that his relationship with subordinate was hindering his ability to do his job, which was why he was making bad calls… Well, that was a damn good reason to get rid of him. By removing myself from the equation, she would lose.

“Y/N?” he asked, chasing me up the steps. “Where are you going?”

“I’m sick of this shit, Aaron,” I huffed as I changed into the first dress I saw in my closet. “I’m going to put an end to this.” I untucked my hair from the back of my dress and pushed out the wrinkles on the front, just over my chest.

“What are you talking about?” he asked me as he followed me around the house again. “You can’t quit!”

“I’m not going to quit!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands up. “I’m just going to put in for a transfer so that Strauss will stop picking on you and you can get back to the team. They need you.”

“They need you, too—”

“No, they don't.” I grabbed my coat from the hanger next to the front door. Hotch stood in front of the door before I could even put my hand on the doorknob. I glared up at him, “This isn’t up for debate, Aaron.”

“You’re right. It’s not.”

I rolled my eyes and shifted my weight on the balls of my feet. “Listen, I haven’t been with the BAU anywhere near as long as you have. My role isn’t as critical as yours— you’re an essential part of the team. You’re the leader they need, which means that they can’t afford to lose you. Me? I’ve been there less than a year and the only thing I can bring to the table is… What? Fast reflexes? Who cares about that when you have Dr. Spencer Reid, one of the smartest people ever born; Derek Morgan, one of the bravest— but still thick headed— men the FBI has ever hired; Penelope Garcia can hack a country in under twenty minutes, if she really wanted to. Me? I’m not special. I got the job because there was a spot open and my sister put a good word in for me.”

“That isn’t true.”

“It isn’t?” I asked sarcastically, knowing fully well that he was lying.

“No! You got the job because you profiled Jason Gideon, of all people. You got the job because you solved the Footpath Killer question faster than anyone else has. You got the job because you worked your ass off at the Academy, and you’ve been working as hard as you can in the FBI since your graduation. Yeah, Elle brought up the fact that you were interested in the open position on the team, but we wouldn’t have hired you if we didn’t think that you deserved it on your own.”

I sighed and looked at the ground. That was great to hear and all, but it still didn’t make up for the fact that I wasn’t extraordinary, and that I was expendable. Hotch was a necessary piece of the team. Without him, they would fall apart, I was sure. Without me, they would be entirely fine until they could find someone new. They did with Elle, right? She was their family as much as she was mine, and when she left, they brought in Emily, and everyone forgot about Elle. It wouldn’t be hard for them to do it again.

He sucked in a deep breath and grabbed my shoulders to ground me again. “You have been working your whole life to get into the BAU specifically. It has always been your dream. You shouldn’t throw that away because I was stupid and asked you out. You shouldn’t have to pay the price for that.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shrugged off his touch. “You seriously did not just say that to me. You were _stupid_ and asked me out? _Stupid_ , Aaron? Is that a fucking joke?”

It finally dawned on him how he had said it and decided to double back. “No— Wait— Listen—”

“No, you listen, Hotch. You have spent your whole career trying to work your way up the chain in the hopes that you’ll be the Director of the FBI one day. That’s _your_ dream, and that’s an achievable dream if you just keep working at it from where you are in the BAU. You’re less than three promotions away from it, and we both know that there is no way in hell Strauss will ever be Director. A suspension based on a relationship that you have with your subordinate isn’t good for your career. Your uphill trudge towards the top will only get that much harder if I don’t put this to an end right now. You need the BAU, I don’t. At least not right now. So I’m going to go to the office and I’m going to tell Strauss to transfer me, and that she should end your suspension.”

“I don’t care about my career, Y/N. I care about _you_. Being in the BAU makes you happy. I don’t need the BAU to make me happy when I have you and Jack here no matter what job I have. I can be successful anywhere in the FBI or otherwise. Let me put in for the transfer.”

I glared at him again. “With all due respect,” I hissed. “And I say this with love, Aaron. But, fuck off. You’re not throwing your career away for me!”

“And you're not going to throw yours away for me!”

We stared at each other with flustered and red faces. He wasn’t fucking listening to me. He just wanted to argue about this, even though there was nothing to argue about. I was right, wasn’t I? There was so much he had to lose because of all of this, and I had so little to lose. Like he said only a few days ago, worse comes to worse, I would just be transferred to another unit. So why the fuck was he standing in my way from just speeding up the process in order to save us both?

He broke our staring contest first as he leaned against the door and wiped his face with his hands. “We’re going in circles.” I hummed an agreement. “There’s no point in arguing about it when we’re not going to come to a consensus.” Well, technically, the _consensus_ should have been letting me leave the house, but fuck free will, right? “Can we try to just talk about this again later when tensions aren’t so high? We might think of a better option.”

I considered. We were both worked up, and we were both convinced that we were right; that was no way to discuss something like this. I trusted Hotch and his decision making, so if he thought that waiting was best… I could spare a few hours or days. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere. There was time.

“You’re right,” I shrugged, putting my coat back. “I was making avocado toast… Can you bear to be a little _millennial_ for breakfast?” I smiled lightly.

Hotch chuckled. “Will there at least be a side of bacon?”

“If you make it yourself,” I booped his nose before turning away to head back towards the kitchen.

Hotch caught my hand and spun me back towards him and into his chest. “Hey,” he trapped my chin between his thumb and index fingers, “we’re going to be okay.”

I nodded, “I know. I love you.”

He kissed me gingerly, “I love you, too.”


	19. BAD IDEA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Brat taming. Bondage (ropes and handcuffs). Sex toys (remote controlled vibrator). Ball gag. Nipple clamps. Edging. Name calling. Impregnation kink. Stop light safe word system. Hate fucking. Angry sex. Oh, boy. Sin. Just pure sin.  
> The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying "good girl".
> 
> TIMELINE: Right after part eighteen.

Hotch practically threw me on the bed before I could say or do anything. One minute we were eating breakfast in the dining room, the next thing I knew, he picked me up and carried me up to our bedroom. Okay, well…  _ Technically _ … It was my fault. But I swear I didn’t think it would end up like this after how we had been practically dancing around being angry at each other all morning. Yeah, I was still mad at Hotch for not letting me go to the office, and, yeah, I was still hurt by what he had said; but under no circumstances was I legitimately mad at him for something beyond that, and none of my feelings were about him or going to risk our relationship. That being said, there was a part of my mind that decided: “Yes, Y/N, it would be a great idea if you pretended to be mad at Hotch while walking around in that dress all morning. Yes. That will go over well for you.” So, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that Hotch was less than impressed with me when I kept bending down to grab things in front of him, or that my hand kept wandering on his leg as we sat at the table, eating our breakfasts.

He had grabbed my hand that was exploring a little too far up his leg, then, before I knew it, he pulled my arm and the rest of me over his shoulder, and he was storming upstairs. I gulped, not moving a muscle out of fear of either falling off his shoulder or getting spanked. Neither of us said a word as he slammed the bedroom door behind us, then threw me onto the bed. I gulped again as I scrambled to the middle of the mattress, watching him with my eyes as he walked around the room to get to the closet. I whimpered because I knew that wasn’t a good sign. Having a kid in the house meant that we had to keep multiple things locked up. Our guns, our fake passports and identifications— don’t ask— and, well, our toys. Most people would keep them hidden in a drawer or something, but with Jessica and Jack coming and going as often as they did, we didn’t want there to ever be a chance of someone stumbling across something we didn’t want them to see.

Now, I guess I could have reasoned that Hotch was just changing out of his work clothes, or maybe he was grabbing an extra blanket or something. Right? Right?… I wanted to laugh nervously, but I was practically petrified as I laid still on the bed, watching the closet door for the first sign of his reemergence. There was the sound of clothes moving around on hangers, which I figured was a sign that he was changing. Good. Maybe I was going to get off free. I had nothing to worry about. It was fine. He probably didn’t even notice my teasing with the dress because he was focused on not burning his bacon. And he probably just moved my hand off of his thigh because he didn’t want me to ruin a pair of work pants. Okay, valid. I was going to be fine—

I whimpered and tried to blend into the mattress as I saw Hotch come out of the closet wearing his grey pajama sweatpants and no shirt, and carrying a black box of our things that we had hidden away. Fuck. My thighs instinctively rubbed together for extra friction of where I was growing hot, but Hotch shot me a glare and I immediately stopped moving. When he was satisfied with my silence and stillness, he continued to walk towards the dresser. He set the box on top of it, his back to me, his stance right in front of my gaze so that I couldn’t spy on what he was doing. I heard him ruffling through the box and I cursed myself for putting myself in this situation. I’d be the first to admit that I was a brat, and I loved getting under Hotch’s skin, but I had never made him mad to this extent. He playfully got mad at me in a dominant way, but I could see how furious he actually was and I knew that the rest of my day was going to be  _ long _ . But I did this to myself, didn’t I? I knew the game I was playing, I knew what buttons I was pressing, and now I had to live with the consequences.

“Take that dress off. Now.” He was still facing away from me, but the gruffness in his tone was different from anything I had ever heard from him before.

I had to put this all in perspective, right. Only the other day, I was teasing Hotch about not being able to touch each other at work before I found out about my suspension. That was strike one. Then he found out that he was getting suspended, which probably put a lot of stress on him, and my solution was to start an argument, and when that didn’t work, I started walking around like a whore. That was strike… one hundred at that point. I had been skating on thin ice, and all of the anger and pressure that had been building in Hotch’s chest finally found a way to be released, and it was to take it out on me. The fact that he wasn’t even coming over to me to rip my clothes off or tell me to keep them on to make the teasing worse just further proved that I was laying on that bed for one reason and one reason only: to make him forget. And I was so ready.

I rushed to pull my dress off and throw it to the side without even looking. I kept my eyes trained on Hotch’s back, refusing to look away because I wanted to catch a glance at what he was doing as soon as I could.

“Panties. Bra.”

I felt my mouth go dry. He wasn’t even going to do that much. He liked doing that. He liked peeling off my panties as slowly as he could in order to watch me beg and squirm. But not that morning. He wanted me to know just how fucked I was, and, boy, was he getting his point across. As I scrambled to get my bra and panties off, Hotch finally turned back around, holding two lengths of rope, two pairs of handcuffs, and a ball gag. Well. Shit.

Silently, Hotch dropped everything on the bed, my eyes still following him, but he focused on his hands and what he was planning on doing. Without warning, he grabbed my left ankle with a tight grip and yanked me towards the bottom left bedpost. I gasped when he started pulling my ankle through an overhand loop on a bight knot attached to the bedpost. When he let go and I tugged to test my mobility, I found that the more I fought against it, the tighter it got around my leg.

Fair enough, Hotchner.

I yelped again when he grabbed my other ankle and pulled it to the right side of the bed, spreading me out as far as possible for him. I tried to tug my left leg closed again, but was only met with the bite of the rope, earning a light hiss from me. Hotch tied my right ankle, too, just as quickly as he had done with the other one, not even taking a moment to look at how spread and vulnerable I was for him.

“Sir—” I began, thinking that I could possibly apologize or at least gain an ounce of sympathy, but Hotch met me with the sternest glare I had ever seen. Never in my life had I seen him so conflicted with anger and lust, an inner struggle which was taking over his eyes, his face, his tensed chest muscles, and his growing erection in his pants. “Sir…”

Hotch bit the inside of his cheek as he picked up the ballgag and came around the side of the bed, not bothering to give me the satisfaction of leaning over my naked body to feel the warmth of his chest or the hardness of his cock through his sweats.

“Open, brat.”

I held back the moan I felt rising in my throat. I was panting while trying so very hard to stay still for him, but the way he said it, the way he seemed so mad and uncontrolled, I swear I never wanted him to fuck me harder in my entire life. There was something so erotic about imagining him hovering over me, hips thrusting into me so hard and fast because he was only focused on his anger and getting it all out by fucking me into the mattress… I could feel myself dripping onto the sheets already.

“I said.  _ Open _ .”

I did as I was told without hesitation. Within a millisecond, Hotch pushed the ball gag into my mouth and I bit down instinctively against the rubber. Hotch lifted my head and buckled the clasps together under my hair. He always threatened that he would finally get a chance to shut me up, I guess that time had finally come.

There wasn’t even a moment to breathe between my head settling back down on the pillows and Hotch slapping one of the handcuffs around my left wrist. As he pulled my hand out towards him, I stretched my fingers to touch the outline of his erection, and I barely got him with the tip of my fingers before he jumped back and groaned. He used the other side of the handcuffs to restrain me against the headboard, and before he could move for the other hand, he put a hand around my neck and leaned over me.

“That was a bad idea. You might want to think about not being a needy whore for once because it’ll just hurt more if you keep acting out.” He squeezed his fingers around neck slightly, earning a tug at my restraints from me. “Hold still.”

I nodded eagerly, as if to say: “Yes, Sir. Whatever you want. Yes. Fuck, yes.” But he didn’t grin wickedly like he normally would. He still frowned and pouted as he let go of me roughly and grabbed the other pair of handcuffs. He walked to the other side of the bed, still insistent on not giving me anymore attention besides the demands he had just given me. After my other hand was cuffed to the other side of the headboard, leaving me  _ completely _ spread out for him, Hotch walked to the end of the bed and stared at me.

He got serious for a moment. Not angry, not wound up, not blinded by lust. Just serious. “We’re going to use Colors.”

I nodded again. It wasn’t common for us to use Colors because he knew my limits and I knew his like the back of my hand. I could tell when he needed to slow down or stop, and he knew the same with me. But there were times, just like this, when making sure that I was safe and comfortable came before getting lost in desperation, lust, and passion.

“You’ll knock on the headboard three times for green, two for yellow, one for red. Got it?”

I craned my neck slightly against the pillows to look at how I was restrained against the headboard and took notice of how close my knuckles were. Practically everyone knew the stop light system, but to review: Green meant I was fine, yellow meant slow down or change or check up, and red meant hard stop. I had never once used red with Hotch. Ever. It never got to a point where I needed to stop immediately and end the scene, simply because Hotch never let it get that far. His own limits didn’t allow him to hurt me, and I understood. He wasn’t into harming me in any way, probably because of all the horrible things we had seen in our line of work. Some people were entirely fucked up, and Hotch didn’t get the point of hurting a partner when the whole point was supposed to be about pleasure. Hence, never having to worry about using red. But he wanted to make sure that there was an understanding that if  _ I _ reached a limit that  _ he _ didn’t foresee, we would stop at once.

“Color,” he demanded of me. In response, I knocked on the headboard three times. I didn’t want him to slow down or change whatever it was he had planned. What he had already done to me was more than I expected, and I was giddy to know more as fast as possible. “Good girl.” He slapped the inside of my thigh, and I jumped slightly, tugging at all of the restraints. He palmed himself through his pants at the sight of me struggling but unable to actually do anything about my predicament. “You can’t even beg for me,” he groaned, snaking his hand past his waistband. “Can’t slip up on calling me ‘Sir’, can’t beg for more— can’t beg for me to stop.” He finally smiled, but it was to himself and a wicked thought he had. “I could keep you like this forever.”

I whined behind the gag, tugging at the ropes on my ankles and handcuffs on my wrists, my eyes pouting softly. All I could think about was how this could go. He was either going to leave me like that until he was bored and wanted to see me squirm as he edged me endlessly for hours, or he was going to immediately pounce on me and fuck me until neither of us could breathe. Either way, I was screwed. Neither option was good for me considering how angry he was with me.

“Maybe then you’ll listen to me and you won’t go ask for a transfer.”

Asshole. I wouldn’t hold it past him since he totally would leave me like this just to prevent me from doing it. That was a terrifying concept.

He pulled his hand from his pants and turned back to the dresser. My breathing sped up as I anxiously anticipated what he would grab next. It was at times like this when I was really starting to regret showing him that box. Yeah, he didn’t even know about it until I brought it from my place when I was moving in. By that point, we already had an unspoken dominant/submissive relationship, but when I packed that box and brought it over, and he was the one who happened to unpack it, that was when we had a legitimate conversation about it. He had endless questions, of course— not because he was naive to the lifestyle and the kink, but because he was curious what I thought of it and to what extent I had tried it.

I had to keep in mind that Hotch had been with Haley his whole life, and she wasn’t exactly the most… Well, frankly, she was a pretty boring person overall. She was nice and everything, but she didn’t have any excitement in her life. Her job, her home, her friends, everything was boring. She didn’t strike me as the kind of person who enjoyed the things I enjoyed, and it took me explaining everything to Hotch over a couple of days for him to realize that it was something he was genuinely into. Because he hadn’t experimented around with Haley, or anyone else, he didn’t realize that it was something he could have an interest in; and, oh, boy, did I screw myself over by telling him everything. One minute he was the silent dominant who just liked to be a little more rough with me in bed, the next, he was tying me up every chance he could get and was insistent that I called him ‘Sir’.

But there were still loads of things we hadn’t tried in that box. Hotch knew of their existence, and he knew how to use all of them, but we just never found the time to use them. In his state, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was willing to try anything— which, in hindsight, was probably why he put Colors in place. I internally screamed.

When Hotch turned around, he was dangling a small chain over his index finger. Connected at the ends of the chain were clamps that looked like small metal clothespins. My eyes shot wide. Hotch never… He never showed any interest… I had originally mentioned that I found them fun because of how the slight pain from the pinch only increased my arousal, but the topic of using them had never come up before. I never thought in a million years that Hotch would want to try them out.

“Color?” he asked before even taking a step towards me.

Telling by my shocked expression behind the gag, he knew that I had been caught off guard, but he wanted to make sure that I was okay with it since it was something he had never played with before. I thought to myself: “If only you knew, Aaron Hotchner.” And I wished that I could knock the headboard a thousand times, a signal that it was more than okay— it was more than green. I had been waiting so long for him to realize that I wasn’t as fragile as he thought. Sure, he was rough in bed, but that never compared to some of the things I had experienced with past partners. Hotch was rough, yes, but to an extent because he always held himself back since he was still learning and exploring. With anger fueling him, there probably wasn’t a chance in hell that he wasn’t thinking about using every single toy in that box just to see how long he could torture me. After all, why would I have bought them and brought them to his house during the move if I didn’t like them and want to use them? It was always just a matter of what he was comfortable with.

I knocked three times, restraining myself from knocking an obnoxious amount of times like I wanted to. Given permission, Hotch stepped forward, fidgeting with the chain so that he could pinch one of the clamps open. I held my breath shortly as I anticipated his next movements. Hotch sat on the side of the bed, his hip pressed against my side. He bit his bottom lip as he concentrated at pinching one of my nipples between his thumb and middle finger while also still holding the clamp open in his other hand.

“Breathe, baby girl,” he encouraged as my nipple hardened against his touch.

I let out a breath as he rolled the sensitive nub and pulled slightly. My back arched off the bed as I moaned behind the gag, my eyes screwing shut. In response, Hotch’s touch left me until I put my hips back on the bed and calmed down. When I had stopped moving again, I watched as he brought the clamp to my nipple and slowly released his grip on it. I screwed my eyes shut and bit into the gag as the pressure of the clamps increased until they were all the way on. Hotch watched me carefully to make sure that I was alright, and I wanted to scream through my gag that I wasn’t as fragile as he thought I was, but I couldn’t think of anything to say or do without just moaning instead.

As Hotch picked up the other end, the chain rattled, which moved the clamp on my nipple. My head hit the pillows again as I groaned and pulled against the cuffs. He saw that the slightest movement or pull of the chain caused a physical reaction from me, and he wasn’t about to forget it or let up. Wickedly, Hotch pulled at the chain lightly and I cursed around the gag as loud as I could. I knew he was mad at me, but, Jesus, did he have to torture me like that? Fuck.

Hotch didn’t hesitate to pinch my other nipple until it was hard, then put the second clamp on. It didn’t sting as much, which was a relief, but I could feel my whole body responding to the consistent pinch, just as I had explained to him once. If I wasn’t soaked before, I didn’t even know how to express how fucking wet I was for him now— and he still hadn’t even touched me past my breasts.

And, again, Hotch grabbed the chain and pulled. My hips bucked once more with the height of the chain, and I saw him smirk, pleased with his work. Asshole. I really,  _ really _ shouldn’t have shown him that box. Once he was done experimenting with these, there was no doubt that he was going to want to explore everything else, no matter how tired or desperate I got. Asshole, asshole, asshole, ass—

I cried out his name as he used his other hand to slap the inside of my thigh again.

Asshole, asshole, asshole—

“Such a needy whore.”

Oh, fuck.

“Do you think that arguing with me then teasing me was a bad idea yet?” he inquired, slapping my other thigh. I nodded a quick agreement, wanting to make him as happy as possible in order to make him stop. “You were expecting this, though. Weren’t you?” I nodded again. “You wanted to be punished, didn’t you?” I kept fucking nodding like it was all I knew how to do. “And now you want me to touch you.” Same thing. “But bad girls don’t get rewarded. They get punished.” Fuck, fuck, fuck.  _ No _ . “There are a million things I have thought about doing to you since the night of the Super Bowl. Do you remember?” He tugged on the chain when I stopped nodding. “Answer me, whore.” I whined and nodded. “You edged me twice.  _ Me _ . Made me give you permission to cum just so that you would relent. I won’t be so kind this time around.”

My eyes followed him again after he let go of the chain and stood up to go back to the box. No, no, no, I thought to myself. Please… I just wanted him to fuck me. I was sorry for pissing him off. I was sorry for arguing with him. I was sorry for teasing him. I shouldn’t have fucked around when tensions were still high from our argument. Fuck that dumb fucking black box. I swear, I was going to burn it all before he could get his hands on it again.

“I’ve waited…” he sucked in a breath, “ _ so long _ to have a day to ourselves again where I could do whatever I wanted with you. Work always got in the way, but…” It was still a sensitive topic for both of us, but reminding himself of it all was what encouraged him to keep up with the roughness and nonchalant attitude. “But now we have all the time in the world.”

He turned back around from the box  _ again _ , this time holding a small controller and vibe in his hand. Yep, I was burning the box. If he was about to do what I thought he was going to do, then I had every reason imaginable to make sure I’d never be tortured this much ever again… No matter how much I ended up secretly liking it.

Hotch kneeled on the edge of the bed, just between my spread ankles, and he settled comfortably while finally taking notice of the mess he made of me. He liked that he could always do that to me without needing to touch me there. All it took was the right words and carefully calculated touches, and I was all his. But I didn’t notice until just then how dark and dilated his eyes were, at least not until he palmed himself again and he looked directly at me. I was so in for it. Fuck…

His index and middle fingers ran down my wet slit without any warning whatsoever. My hands fisted around the chains of the handcuffs holding me back from grabbing him and pulling him over me, and my hips bucked up. He didn’t stop me that time, which was some kind of relief, I supposed. When his fingers dipped ever so slightly into my core, I moaned his name behind the gag, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to decipher that I had broken the rules. He pulled his fingers from me, then dragged them back up to my clit, and he circled it twice. Just twice. That was it. And then his hand was gone from me. Fucking tease.

“I wonder how long it will take to break you,” he said more to himself than to me. “Maybe just the two edges again, but I won’t stop this time. I won’t give you any options. I won’t give you an out so that you can trap me again. You’re going to lay here, begging to tip over the brink, until you learn that I made no mistake asking you out. Until you learn that you’re not going to do anything stupid like ask for a transfter. Until you learn that you can’t parade around in my clothes and short dresses and act like I won’t do anything about it. Until you learn that I only love you.” 

Suddenly, Hotch slid the bullet shaped vibrator into me with ease. He had only used his fingers to see how easy it would be to make it fit, and once he was pleased, he had decided to put the toy in me. So he was an asshole and a tease. Game on, Aaron Hotchner.

When the toy was settled inside of me, Hotch brushed his fingers over my clit “innocently”, then sat back. “Let’s see…” he mumbled to himself, looking down at the controller in his hand. “If I do this—” I cried out again, bucking around like crazy, and screaming a string of curse words until I ran out of breath. He had turned it onto the highest setting without warning, and then he shut it off once he understood. “Oh, so that’s what that does,” he grinned. I was going to kill him, I swear. “How about this one?” A lighter moan escaped me as he put it on the lowest setting. “That’s what we want for now.” My eyes shot wide again as I lifted my head to look at him in a panic. “What? Is it not enough?” I shook my head. Of course it wasn’t fucking enough. “Too bad.”

I continued to stare at him with wide, shocked eyes as he stood from the bed and walked over to the leather chair in the corner of the room that he liked to read in whenever he was too lazy to go work in our office just down the hall. He reclined, unbothered by my constant muffled moaning and pleading. Every time I moved, I felt the chain on my chest move, causing the clamps to move, causing me to remember how good the pinch felt, causing my pussy to throb, and the cycle would repeat. Hotch was being the absolute worse, keeping the vibrator on low because he knew it wasn’t enough to even get me close to an edge. He liked watching me squirm with the cycle I had unfortunately made for myself. He liked that he could control me all the way from his seat across the room, and all he had to do was relax and palm himself.

“Sir, please,” I begged, knowing fully well that it wouldn’t help. “Please—” I was grinding my hips against nothing, but I could still feel the toy moving inside of me, and that was good enough. “More…”

“Color.”

I knocked three times. Asshole.

“Then stop making noise.”

I fell silent at his command, but I kept moving in order to just feel  _ more _ . Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Hotch shuffling out of his sweatpants so that he was finally naked, and his erection sprang free. He wasted no time forming a fist around his length and began pumping at a pace faster than even I would have gone. The sight of him tensing his abs and arms, curling his toes against the carpet, and biting back the same pathetic moans I was spewing was so intoxicating and arousing.

Next thing I knew, though, as I was finally catching a rhythm with the toy inside of me while watching Hotch fuck his hand, the vibrator’s speed increased. My entire body collapsed on the bed as I was turned into nothing but moans. I was already so close, but I couldn’t let him know that if I was ever going to cum. I knew the rules, I was supposed to ask for permission, but I would rather cum without permission and be punished then not cum at all. But just as I thought it, just as my orgasm was building, Hotch turned the toy off, stealing my high from me before it could even reach its peak. I cried behind the gag and knocked on the board three times before he could even ask. I was so desperate for him to turn it back on again, I was going to do anything and everything in order to encourage him to turn it up.

“You were going to cum,” he growled. I shook my head, lying as hard as I could. “Yes. You were.” My stomach tensed, but my whole body continued laying limp as the toy turned back on. “It’s so easy to tell.” He turned it up and I moaned. “You try to pretend like you’re not, you get so still and quiet because you think it’ll trick me.” He turned it off again. “But I know better.” I whined and pulled again. He grinned, “See?” He turned it on. “And we haven’t even gotten you to the edge yet.” Fuck. “Maybe if I do this…” He turned it to the highest setting.

“Sir, please!” I cried out, knowing that I wouldn’t last long like that.

Hotch  _ laughed _ . “I heard that one. You have no idea how pathetic you sound when you’re like this. I’m so used to having you beg, scream, cry, and moan for me. I like that you can’t say anything coherent. It’s refreshing to take away that bratty tongue of yours.”

“Sir—”

“You haven’t even edged once and look at you. A mess.  _ My mess _ ,” he groaned and threw his head back as his own thumb wiped over his sensitive tip.

My stomach was twisting into a familiar knot that I couldn’t stop, slow down, or even encourage, if I wanted to. The toy was doing all the work, and watching Hotch fall apart in his seat wasn’t exactly helping me either. I thought about how badly I wanted to reach out and touch him. I wanted to grab onto his biceps as he braced himself on either side of me before slowly thrusting into me. I wanted to kiss his lips, his cheeks, his forehead, his nose— everything. I never wanted to stop kissing him. Most of all, I wanted his cock inside me. It was unbearable to know that he was so close yet so far from me. He was only a few feet away, but there was no way he was going to go to all this trouble of tying me up and toying with me only to give in and fuck me as soon as possible. There was a good chance I might not even get any of him… And that thought was torture.

My edge was approaching faster than expected, and I knew that meant he was going to stop it again. I anticipated the toy turning off with every second that passed. Every muscle in my body tensed with how on edge I was between expecting my orgasm to be ripped away at the last second while also still fighting with the toy to make me cum. It was right there— I was about to tip over. I could feel it. I was clenching as hard as I could around the toy, and the knot had constricted as tightly as possible in my body… and then it was gone.

I heard the headboard hit the wall as my palms laid flat against it and pushed back hard as I stretched my whole body while still trying to chase my orgasm. My back arched, the nipple clamps moving around again, and the still toy inside of me moved against my walls. But nothing. The knot in my body slowly started to untangle and subside. The pleasure that had been building dissipated and was replaced with the sudden sting of the clamps racing through my veins.

That was only the first edge and it hit me like a fucking train. Hotch liked doing soft edges because it built up my stamina and it was more about me begging for more than begging to cum. But he had waited until the very last second, just before I was about to cum, to rip it all away. I hadn’t expected the hard edge, which was why it hit me so hard when it was stolen from me. And Hotch seemed so satisfied that he didn’t even wait for me to entirely calm down before starting again. The speed wasn’t as high this time, but it certainly wasn’t as low as the first time.

I was still pleading, even though it wasn’t going to do anything. And then my second edge approached. Hotch stopped moving his hand on his cock as he watched me, probably because he got a little too close to the edge himself.

It took watching me ride through four more edges for him to finally touch himself again. Only the lightest pass over his tip with his thumb made him buck his hips slightly and I saw his entire length twitch with need. I wondered if he was really suffering just as much as me. I mean, he was obviously having fun watching me fall apart on our bed while completely unable to stop the endless torture, but on some level, he was probably getting just as frustrated as me since he wasn’t finding the relief he needed. Hotch liked cumming one place and one place only: in me. Anywhere else felt like he didn’t accomplish his goal, unless he was really frenzied like this. There were plenty of times, like the limo ride in St. Louis, where Hotch couldn’t or wouldn’t take me, but he needed to cum so badly that he would use my mouth and watch me swallow every drop. I figured that since I was gagged and he was thoroughly enjoying it, he wasn’t going to use his back up plan. It was either in me or not at all, and there was no way he was going to choose the second option willingly.

Another two edges washed over me, one after the other, Hotch still refusing to let up or waste precious time for things like catching my breath or calming down entirely. He wanted the edges to be endless and… painful. And they fucking were. I couldn’t even remember what soft edges felt like anymore because he had practically broken me with the hard edges already. Another orgasm escaped me as Hotch turned the vibrator off again. What were we on? Seven? Eight? A hundred? I couldn’t keep track, despite how hard I was trying. They seemed to blend into one another,

Hotch finally stood from his seat and came back over to the bed. My chest was rising and falling dramatically as I breathed through my nose, trying to find my composure so that he couldn’t find any kind of sexual relief in my desperation.

He looked down at me with a frown again, no wicked smirk in sight. When he took note of my silence and obedience, he grabbed the chain again and pulled. My back arched. “I made no mistake asking you out. Do you understand me?” I nodded hurriedly, trying to give him a reason to let go of the chain. He pinched my cheeks with his free hand so that I was looking right at him. His thumb wiped over the ballgag and I moaned quietly. He pulled harder at the chain. “You know that I love you, right?”

Oh, no, no, no… Aaron Hotchner, please… Sir, please… I was begging to myself, but there was nothing I could do to warn him that I was sorry for being a brat. He asked if I loved him over Colors because we both knew what was coming, and it wasn’t anything new. It was going to be more rough than usual, and he would use Colors if he needed to then, but nothing had actually happened yet… I almost preferred the idea of being edged with the toy again over what was about to happen.

“I asked you a question, slut.”

I nodded and mumbled through the gag, “Yes, Sir.”

“Good.” He released his grip on my cheeks and dropped the chain. I winced at the minor pain before feeling the pleasure race to my core again. He turned the toy on again and leaned in real close to my face. His breath was hot on my nose as he stared at me. “I’m going to fuck the brat out of you now.” I gulped. “Color.” I knocked three times. “Of course you want that.” He laughed at me in a degrading way that made me moan and buck my hips.

The toy turned off again, proving to me that he had only turned it on towards the end in order to distract me and rile me up. When it was still inside me, Hotch grabbed the end of it and slowly slid it out. I gasped as much as I could at the feeling of emptiness that overwhelmed me. Hotch shuffled on the bed, his thighs moving to bracket my hips. His erection rested against my stomach, and I tried to squirm around, but he forced his weight on me so that I couldn’t move.

“Do you remember that night how you touched yourself without my permission, and then you rode me… I remember fitting into this tight pussy with such ease,” he whispered as he fit one finger inside of me, but refused to move it. I let out a sigh, thankful to finally just be feeling him. “You’re always so wet.” His finger retreated and I whimpered. “I promised that night that I was going to ruin you… and I never got the chance…”

So, you know how people say that Karma is a bitch. Yeah, well, this was a prime example of that. While it was perpetually entertaining to fuck with Hotch and get on his nerves in an abunance of ways, it had all finally caught up to me.

“I don’t think I even want you to cum today.”

“Please, no!” I cried through the gag. I wanted to cum. So fucking bad. I would do literally anything.

“Maybe if you take my cock like a good girl.”

I nodded desperately as he shifted his weight on me down so that he could plant his knees between my spread thighs. Finally. Finally, I was going to feel him. All of him. Fuck, yes.

He took his length in his palm again and pumped himself a few times as he lined up his tip with my entrance. When I first felt him, I moaned his name quietly, and he must have heard it, because the next thing I knew, his free hand shot up to my neck. I looked at him with apologetic eyes, but he didn’t look at me or care about what I had to say.

Hotch held my throat in his hand as he slowly inserted his cock inside of me. He took his time, making sure that I felt every inch as it stretched me and hit every wall. When he bottomed out in me, Hotch didn’t waste a single second to start thrusting in and out of me at an ungodly pace. I tugged again, this time not giving up on the idea of trying to pull as hard as I could to see if it would somehow magically release me.

Hotch’s grip on my neck tightened as he groaned roughly at my movement. “You’re not going anywhere.”

My breath hitched at the pressure of his grip and I felt my head spin. It felt so good. Taking every inch of him over and over again, without mercy, without a constant pace that I could predict… it was inebriating. He wasn’t focused on pleasing me, or making sure that I was getting close, or that I wanted to cum. The only thing he was focused on was cumming inside of me as fast and as hard as possible in order to get rid of all of his worries outside of the bedroom. Hotch wanted to forget just how badly our lives were falling apart, and he just wanted to remind himself that I was a constant— no matter how bratty I would get. I would be there, I would always love him, and he could use me to get rid of his anger if he really wanted to. It was just an added perk that he had me all tied up and unable to argue. He could do whatever he wanted with me, and that power was getting to his head.

His lips found my neck as he concentrated on fucking his anger away. When he began nibbling on the sensitive patch of skin just below my jaw, that was when I totally lost it. I didn’t realize before just how much control I still had over my mind and body, even when I thought he had broken me entirely, but now, with him fucking me so hard I knew I was going to be sore for a few days, and his mouth working on marking me for everyone to see, I lost every ounce of control I had. My body went stock-still, and I let him use me however he wanted.

Hotch immediately took notice and complemented, “Good girl,” against my skin before continuing to leave another hickey on my collarbone.

His pace quickened somehow, though I wasn’t sure where he got the strength for it. It only took another minute or so of him fucking at this new pace for his thrusts to get sloppy, a silent signal that he was getting close. Hotch sat up, his hand still wrapped around my neck, though, and he grabbed the toy from where it was resting to my right. He turned it on and pressed it to my clit, making me clench around him.

Hotch groaned, “You’re so tight. Fuck.” He was slowing down, despite his attempts to keep going as fast and hard as before since it seemed to be working for both of us, but his stamina was running out as he was approaching his high. “I’m gonna—” His words sputtered as he released his grip on my throat and grabbed the chain again with his other hand. He pulled at the clamps as he thrusted into me, cumming deep inside of me with a loud groan.

With the vibrator still pressed to my clit, I was only seconds behind him, the feeling of his cock twitching inside me practically pushing me over the edge. My legs shook and I stopped pulling against all of the restraints as I tipped over the edge and screamed his name. But Hotch didn’t relent. He pressed the toy against me with more pressure, and his hips started slowly thrusting again, but not too fast because he was still sensitive.

He released the chain, but pinched the end of the clamps to open them and pull them away from my nipples. He started with the left side, catching me off guard. Without time to prepare myself for the shock of the pain that would follow, I screamed as the clamp left my breast. Hotch smirked and leaned down to take my nipple in his mouth. I cursed a thousand times, forgetting that the vibrator was even pressed to me because there was too much focus on my sore breasts.

When the pain subsided, Hotch leaned up and pulled the right clamp away, earning another scream, this time just not as loud. He immediately sucked on my nipple again, flicking his tongue over the sensitive and sore nub. With there no more pain to distract me, and the sudden awareness of the pleasure pressed to my clit, I came again without warning. Hotch wriggled the vibrator up and down, and side to side as I rode out my second high with him still buried himself entirely inside of me.

“Good girl,” he cooed, as I came down from my high. He pulled the toy away and turned it off. “Color?” he asked sincerely, not at all angry anymore. Exhausted, I knocked three times on the headboard, then slumped entirely. He groaned quietly as he pulled out of me, and I sighed, unable to keep moaning or cursing.

When we had both calmed down and caught out breaths, Hotch reached behind my head and undid the ball gag, carefully pulling it out of my mouth to make sure my jaw wasn’t strained or sore. Hotch reached over my head and unclasped the handcuffs with the safety button on the back. After my hands were freed, Hotch carefully grabbed my wrists with his hands and kissed them gingerly. “Are you okay?”

I nodded and waited for him to lift his head so that I could kiss him. The second his eyes were on mine, I leaned up and pressed my lips to his eagerly, and when he relaxed and released my wrists, I brought my hands to his face and held him close. “I love you.”

He smiled against my lips, “I love you, too.”

“Feel better?” I laughed. He nodded and kissed me again. “I’m sorry I made you mad.”

He kissed me delicately and wrapped his arms under me so that he could hug me. “We still need to talk about it later.” I hummed an agreement. “But I love you so much.”

“I love you more.” I pecked his lips. “ _ Sir _ .”


	20. ONE LAST CASE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of smut. Mentions of Dom/sub relationship. Talk of murder, sexual assault, kidnapping-- literally everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 3 Episode 02. A few days after part nineteen.

As far as Jack was aware, Hotch and I had some time off from work, which was why we were around more often. Jack spent a few nights at Haley’s house during the school week, but when he started throwing tantrums about not getting to stay over at our house, Haley had to give in and call us to see if it was alright if he stayed the rest of the week. Of course, Hotch and I were ecstatic to have Jack over more. Considering how often we were away from him and our time with him was never guaranteed, we wanted to utilize every second Haley would allow us to have him.

It had only been a few days since Hotch and I argued, but we still hadn’t discussed it again like we promised. I think that deep down, the courage I mustered before to think about going to Strauss and asking for a transfer, it all immediately disappeared once my anger subsided; and Hotch was just as scared to bring up the topic again for fear of riling me up, which would cause us to have the same argument. There was a point where I asked myself if I should have just snuck out of the house and gone to talk to Strauss anyways, but Hotch and I made a promise, and, like I said before, I trusted him. If he thought that waiting to see how our evaluations would turn out was best, then I was going to wait. But if there was any chance in hell that he was going to get fired because of me, I was going to rain down hell on Erin Strauss.

On Tuesday of the following week, eight days since my suspension, I picked up Jack from school while Hotch was busy cleaning up from our… afternoon activities. I had sub dropped shortly after we were done, and he felt horrible about it, even though it had nothing to do with him. The relief that came from being out of control and being under him was exactly what I needed to forget about all of the stress we were under, but when we came back down to Earth, it suddenly all hit me like a train again. It took about an hour of Hotch holding me, kissing me, and talking to me in order to calm me down. By the time I had relaxed, I looked over at the clock and realized that one of us needed to pick up Jack while someone else needed to pick up the house— yeah, the whole house. It was an  _ entire _ afternoon of going through the black box, alright. He offered to do both, that it wouldn’t matter if he was a few minutes late picking up Jack, but I told him that I would rather get a Superman hug from Jack than sit around doing nothing.

So that was how I ended up in front of Jack’s school while wearing a red v-neck shirt tucked into a pair of Hotch’s college sweatpants that had to be rolled up on my waist since he was so much taller than me. Yes, I was very aware of my new obsession, but it was his fault for leaving his old college clothes in a box in the back of his closet. They were just sitting there, practically screaming my name, begging to be shown attention again. How could I not throw them in the wash and then wear them around the house? It wasn’t like I could wear work clothes or my pajamas all day. Besides, Hotch seemed to like it. His eyes were starting to linger on my body more, and he was getting a little more handsy. That was how we ended up using the entire house in the afternoon, for example.

Jack came running up to me and immediately caught me in a Superman embrace. I loved that this was our new  _ thing _ . There was a difference between getting a hug from a friend or otherwise and getting a Superman hug from Jack. Somehow, him strangling me by squeezing as hard as he could during our hugs was more comforting that anything else in the world. I loved how he strained to hug me as tight as possible, and I could squeeze him back, too. I liked how he hid his face in the crook of my neck while he did it so that he could focus on the hug and being as strong as possible. Those little moments and little details were what made it all worth it. It was a reminder of how much I loved him and his father, and that we should keep fighting for that happiness and these moments. There was no point in letting Strauss win, no point in letting her get to me and our personal life.

When we got home, the house was clean with no sign of how Hotch and I spent our day, but what was more noticeable than anything else was the fact that Hotch wasn’t around. Maybe he went to Haley’s house to pick something up for Jack, or maybe she needed something from us? Maybe he went to go get us dinner? Maybe he went to go pick up groceries? There were a thousand different places where he could be, but I wasn’t sure, so I told Jack to go to the dining room and start working on his homework while I called his dad.

When I flipped my phone open to dial Hotch, I saw that I had two missed calls from Morgan that I must’ve ignored while picking up Jack or driving us home. I figured that I would call Hotch first, see where he was and when I should be expecting him home, then I would call Morgan back to see what he needed. When I called Hotch, though, it went straight to voicemail. I furrowed my brows before trying his phone again. Still nothing. Well, he was probably just busy and he would call me back. In the meantime, I could at least call Morgan back.

“Why the hell did I just run into Hotch at the office only to hear that he’s requesting for a transfer?” Morgan asked curtly before there could be an exchange of niceties.

“What?”

“Yeah, I just passed him, like, ten minutes ago when I first tried calling you.”

“Ten minutes ago?” I looked at the clock on the wall.

If Hotch had already been meeting with Strauss about a transfer for ten minutes, that meant that some kind of decision had likely already been reached. Hotch… He left when he knew I was gone and couldn’t stop him, and he did exactly what I wanted to do a few days ago. That wsn’t fucking fair. I trusted him. I told him that we would wait to make any kind of decision until we could talk about it. Why would he do this? It should have been me. He knew that it should have been me. Fucking asshole.

“Y/N,” Morgan called my attention back to reality with a softer, worried tone. I hummed a “what” and he continued, “What’s going on? Why haven’t the two of you been at work? Why did you storm out last week?”

I sighed and put a palm to my forehead while my thoughts raced. “Strauss suspended both of us because of our relationship.”

Morgan scoffed, “That’s bullshit.”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me, but then my face fell flat again. “I was the one who was supposed to put in for the transfer, but Hotch made me promise that we would talk about it later… He lied to me, Morgan.”

“I’m so sorry.” He sighed like he was annoyed with something else, “Listen, I’ve gotta go. We've got a new case, and Emily and Gideon are both MIA. I’ll call you later, chica. Hang tight. We’ll get this all figured out soon, don’t you worry.”

“Be safe.”

“You got it.”

I sighed as I hung up the call and put my phone away. Aaron Hotchner… What was I supposed to do? I looked him in the eye last Wednesday and I told him that I was going to wait because I trusted him and I believed him that everything would be alright. I told him that I loved him as we agreed to not doing anything about it yet. How could he lie to me like this? How could he betray my trust like this? Did it have to do with me sub dropping? Please… No… I told him that it wasn’t his fault. He did everything right and he did everything he could. It wasn’t his fault…

“Y/N! I’m stuck!” Jack called from the dining room. He must have started with his math homework, which was why he was having trouble. Shit.

“Alright, one second, little man!” I yelled back calmly.

It wasn’t common for me to sub drop— hell, I even told Hotch that to make sure he knew that it didn’t have to do with him. If that was the cause of his snap, he had to realize that it wouldn’t fix things, it would only make them worse. Me sub dropping shouldn’t’ve had anything to do with his job. Why did he have to be so damn stubborn all the time?

“Y/N!” Jack called again.

I sighed, wiping my forehead clean. Help Jack with homework first, argue with Hotch about how he was an idiot later. That was all I could possibly do. Feeling angry and helpless could wait, so I stepped into the dining room and sat down with Jack to take a look at what he was working on. Multiplication still, but this time with twelves, the demon spawn of multiplication. I didn’t blame him for struggling with it. Hotch and I were always there to help him if he needed it, even if he were to ever ask us what 2+2 was.

* * *

It took us about an hour to finish all of Jack’s math homework. Oh, to be a kid in school again where work only took about an hour or so and you could practically ask someone else to do it for you. Jack had it good, he had no freaking clue. Sometimes I wished that I were in his shoes, but what good would that have done me? After working on his math, though, he insisted that he could do the rest of it on his own in his bedroom, so I let him run off to be alone.

Hotch hadn’t come home while we were still working in the dining room, so I moved to the living room to wait for him. I didn't turn on the TV, I didn’t listen to music, and I didn’t even look at my phone. I just stared at the wall while lost in thought. Why did he do it? I told him that he was an essential part of the team, that no one could afford to lose him at the BAU. He couldn’t lose the BAU. He had everything to lose, and I had nothing, and yet he did it probably for me, and that made me feel like  _ shit. _ I didn’t want him to give up everything for me. I know that in movies that always sounds so romantic, but knowing that he gave it up because he wanted me to be happy over all else… How was I supposed to live with that?

Hotch deserved the world. He deserved to be happy. He said it himself that his job, his son, and me all made him happy. What would his formula for happiness look like if we took away his job? What would it take to make him happy again? I was sure that he was going to come home and insist that all he needed was me and Jack, but that wasn’t true. At least I knew it wasn’t true for me, and we were eerily similar, so it probably wasn’t true for him either. My formula for happiness was Elle, Hotch, Jack, and my job. It took me a long time to be happy again after I lost Elle, but I  _ did _ find happiness again because I had my job, Hotch, and Jack there to distract me. Our careers were a huge part of our lives. Without our jobs to distract ourselves, we were miserable— we had proven that much since our suspensions. Nothing, not even me and Jack, could make Hotch happy if he lost the BAU. And I was absolutely petrified to face that truth.

And then I heard a car pull up to the curb outside of our house. I knew that it was Hotch, probably having caught a cab or asked for a ride home from Anderson or something. I didn’t move, though. The wall seemed to stare back at me as I considered what I would say and how our conversation would go. I certainly didn’t want to yell at him because that didn’t get us anywhere the other day, but it was going to be damn near impossible to keep my cool.

“Morgan called,” I told Hotch when I heard the door open. Hotch stopped in his tracks when he realized that he had been caught. “He told me everything.” The door closed and Hotch’s keys hit the table. “So did Strauss give in? Is she transferring you?”

“I swear, Y/N, I was going to tell you.” he said regretfully as he walked around the couch and sat next to me. I looked up at him to see that he was wearing a work suit. “We were going to talk about it, just like we promised, but I saw that it was taking a toll on you, and I just had to put an end to it.”

“That wasn’t for you to decide, Hotch.”

“I know that you said it had nothing to do with me, but I was sick of sitting by while this ate at you.” He dropped a file he had been carrying onto his lap before grabbing my hands. “It’s done. It’s over. They have no reason to keep you suspended anymore. We’ll be getting the call to reinstate you any day now.”

I looked at the file he had brought home, “Does that have to do with your transfer?” I figured that changing the subject was better than arguing about something we couldn’t fix. And if I were being honest, I realized how little energy I had, especially for calculating jabbing moves required for an argument.

He followed my gaze, patted the top of the folder, then shook his head. “No. No. Garcia gave this to me on my way out. Apparently it’s the case the team is working on right now.”

“And she gave it to you?”

“Said she had orders to do so,” he shrugged. “There’s something else,” he told me as I grabbed the file out from under his hands to take a look. “Prentiss quit.”

I raised a brow. “What?”

“She came into my office while Strauss and I were talking. She’s leaving the BAU.”

“Do you know why?”

“She wants to work for the State Department, apparently.”

That didn’t answer my question. Why the hell was Emily quitting? She loved the BAU just as much as the rest of us. She had made it plain to all of us on multiple occasions that she felt like we were her family, and that she felt at home with us. It didn’t sit right with me that she was leaving at the same time as me and Hotch. But then I remembered something Morgan said on the phone. He mentioned that both Emily and Gideon were gone. Emily had now been accounted for, but no sign of Gideon? That was equally troubling. It seemed like of the eight members of our team, half of us were away from the office for an abundance of reasons. 50% of our team was gone, and yet Strauss didn’t see that something was wrong? Maybe someone should have had the balls to tell her that her bad leadership was what landed us in this mess in the first place. If Hotch hadn’t already gone in to request a transfer, I would have gone in myself to say it straight to her face since I didn’t get to last Monday when she suspended me.

“What about Gideon?” I inquired. Hotch only answered with a raised brow. “Morgan said that he’s MIA.”

Hotch’s face fell. “I had no idea.”

So Gideon was missing, Emily was leaving the BAU, I was suspended until further notice, and Hotch was getting transferred to… Where was he getting transferred to? I realized that I didn’t know, so I asked. Hotch lowered his gaze and shamefully admitted that he was being sent to a white collar crime division. Basically FBI hell. It was clear that he didn’t want to discuss it, at least not yet, so I didn’t pry.

“What about the case?” I asked, opening up the file.

“The team flew to Milwaukee. Four women have been killed so far, and another woman went missing two days ago. They’re all blonde, all married, have children, and don’t have any jobs. All of the bodies have been left in the same neighborhood, lines of lipstick tracing their bodies, and their hearts carved out.”

“Their hearts?” I turned to the first page of evidence photos. “Any signs of sexual assault?”

“None was mentioned in the reports, at least.”

“What about the neighborhoods they’re being left in? It’s near one of the largest public schools in the area.” I pointed to a map of where all of the bodies were found, and right in the middle of it was a huge public school campus— triple the size of Jack’s private school. It had multiple buildings, probably about two for elementary, middle school, and high school each. It was no coincidence that the school happened to be in the epicenter. “Maybe he’s preying on the mothers of students?”

“That would mean he’s probably a father who can blend into the crowds there.”

“Or he’s a student in the middle school or high school.”

“No,” Hotch shook his head. “A middle schooler wouldn’t have the strength to carve out a heart like this, and, statistically speaking, high schoolers are much more prone to sexual assault.”

“So he could be anyone.”

Our profile hadn’t changed at all. We had working theories, yeah, but without seeing the crime scenes for ourselves, or getting to talk to the detectives, or getting to talk to locals, there wasn’t much else to help us decide how to pinpoint our profile. Since he could be anyone older than seventeen, that wasn’t much help for the team. Even if we wanted to say that it could be a parent, how could we be sure that it wasn’t just some creep who managed to keep his head down and go unnoticed in the back of the parking lot or something.

“They should be finishing up at the crime scene. I’ll try calling Morgan, see if they found anything new,” Hotch offered, picking up the phone.

I nodded and kept flipping through the pages of the files, while thinking to myself how much I was going to miss working cases with him. I liked how well we played off of each other, that if I had a thought or a theory, he would run through it with me to see if it made any sense. Like with this case, I thought that it was set in stone that the Unsub had something to do with the school, but Hotch saw that there were obvious holes in the hypothesis— holes that I couldn’t see because I had it set in my mind that I was right. But at least we determined that the Unsub was an adult, which could potentially save the team some time. Especially with only three of them working in the field, they would need all the help and time they could get. There was only so much Garcia could do from her computer, and Hotch and I were practically useless from our couch, all the while, Gideon was still somewhere unknown.

“Hey, Morgan,” Hotch greeted with the phone against his ear. “I’ve got Y/N here with me.” He hummed and nodded in agreement after a moment, then brought the phone between us while putting it on speaker. “What’s going on over there?”

“Well, Strauss criticized and offended the lead detective within the first 45 seconds on her first crime scene, and we’ve practically hit a dead end. So, just peachy. How about you guys? Did you find anything yet?”

“We’ve been looking over the files,” I began. “All of the bodies have been found within a ten mile radius surrounding one of the biggest public schools in the state. Each victim has been taken fifteen minutes after the last bell of the day, which is at 3:25. Two days later, they turn up fifteen minutes after the first bell of the day, which is at 8:10. We think that it’s very possible you’re looking for an adult male over the age of seventeen who has some kind of connection to the school. He might work there, he might currently be or previously been a student, he could be a parent, or he could be some kind of pervert. Regardless, he’s going to be at or around the school during drop off and pick up.”

“Do you know how he’s taking them yet?” Hotch asked Morgan.

“No. But this helps. Really, guys. Thank you. I’ll let you guys know what else we find. Hopefully we can catch up to him before he can take someone else.”

“You’ve got until 3:25, so, good luck.”

Morgan hung up the call before anything else could be said. I looked up at Hotch and handed him the case file so that he could review it again. We had helped as much as we could with the profile, and until they called back, we were going to feel entirely useless. Jack was upstairs, busy doing his homework since he knew that we were doing our superhero homework downstairs, and he wasn’t allowed to know about it since he was still a junior superhero. Hotch seemed antsy, though, about leaving the BAU and not being able to do more for our last case together. He got involved, and now he was desperate to see it to the end, and I couldn’t blame him. He didn’t want to do some white collar bullshit job. He didn’t want to do anything besides be the Unit Chief of the BAU.

“You know…” I whispered, putting my hand on his shoulder, “technically your transfer request hasn’t gone through yet if Strauss isn’t in the office to do it. It’s probably just sitting on her desk, waiting to be processed, which means that you’re,  _ technically _ , still a part of the team. If you wanted to, you could go to Milwaukee to help with the case. And I actually happen to think that you should go.”

“What about you?” he asked warily.

I shrugged, “I’m still suspended, so I can’t go, but I’ll do what I can here; and maybe I can look for Gideon, too. It’s not like him to disappear like this, but there’s a chance that he’s probably just up at his cabin.”

“That’s not what I mean, Y/N.”

I bit my lip for a brief moment while I thought. There was no easy way to tell him that I wanted more than anything to go with him, to solve this case together with him one last time. Since I couldn’t admit that without guilting him into staying, I decided to lie and say what he needed to hear. “I’ll be fine here. Think of it like giving back up in the same way Garcia does… Just without the computers and the hacking skills.” I forced a faux, bright smile onto my face that made Hotch chuckle. “I’ll look for Gideon, you go to Milwaukee.”

Hotch leaned towards me and kissed me. “You’re the best,” he mumbled against my lips.

“I know,” I laughed before kissing him back. He leaned in a little further into our kiss, but I pushed him away with a palm on his chest to stop us before things could accelerate and spiral out of control. “Go get your go bag.” I pecked his lips again before practically shoving him off the couch and towards the stairs. 

When Hotch came back a few minutes later, he was carrying his go bag on his shoulder while lifting Jack over his head like he was an airplane soaring through the sky. Jack was making noises and trying not to laugh or move around too much because he still didn’t want his dad to drop him. I craned my neck back to take a look at them and I grinned.

“Incoming!” I exclaimed, holding my arms out. Hotch moved Jack side to side like a plane falling out of the air until he could carefully drop Jack into my lap. I groaned, catching Jack, and making an explosion noise with my mouth. Jack thrashed around and giggled as I started tickling him, earning a chuckle from Hotch, too. Jack pried at my hands, and I started to relent because he needed to say goodbye to his dad. “Alright,” I surrendered, throwing up my hands. “Go give dad a Superman hug.” I picked up Jack from my lap and set him on his feet.

Hotch kneeled and caught Jack in his arms. I pushed myself off the couch as they hugged each other as tightly as possible. Hotch lifted Jack as he stood, still hugging his son like he never wanted to let go. As I approached, Hotch held out a free arm for me, so I pressed against his side and hugged both him and Jack. Hotch kissed my temple and squeezed my shoulders with the arm he had wrapped around me. 

He moved his lips to my ear and whispered, “Try not to bother Gideon if you figure out where he is. If he’s really at his cabin, it just means he still needs some time after Sarah. We can give him that.”

I nodded and pressed into his touch. “Get back here as soon as you can.”

“I love you.”

“I’ll say it back when you come home without a single scratch on you.”

He squinted. “Come on.” He grabbed my hips and swayed me back and forth. “One more before I go.”

“I’m still mad at you, technically.”

“Come on.”

I bit back a smirk. If I could have, I would have screamed: “I love you, Aaron Hotchner!” at the top of my lungs a thousand times. But despite that, I was genuinely still mad at him, even though I was trying to mask it as well as I could. He lied to me. He betrayed my trust. That didn’t just go away. I know I acted like I was fine and I changed the topic to focus on the case, but I still felt a need in the pit of my stomach to yell at him and argue with him. Once this case would be over, I needed him to know the truth before it ate me alive. I needed him to know that he couldn’t just betray my trust like this and I wouldn’t care. I kept no secrets from him, even when they were painful to admit. All I asked of him was to show me the same courtesy. That wasn’t too far fetched, was it?

“I love you,” I feigned reluctancy. “Get back here as soon as you can.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.” He kissed Jack’s forehead before letting him down. Jack hugged his father’s waist, trying to make him stay, but Hotch had to pry him off. He had to go. “You’re sure about this?” he asked me worriedly.

“We’ll be fine. Go.” I pushed him towards the door gently. Jack hugged my leg since he couldn’t hug his father again. “I love you,” I finally admitted with sincerity.

Without me in the field with him, I couldn’t examine the threats out there, and I wasn’t sure if he would come home to me. I could hope and pray that he would come home, of course, but I wouldn’t be out there to take the bullet for him if came down to it. If something bad happened out there, I wanted to make sure that the last thing we said to each other was “I love you.” I didn’t want to have any regrets simply because I was mad at him. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t admit it before he left.

Hotch waved to us as he opened the front door, and Jack waved back as I picked him up. Hotch smiled at me one last time before closing the door and hurrying out for the cab he must have called while he was upstairs packing. When it was just me and Jack again, I kissed his cheek and gauged to see how he was feeling. He probably wasn’t used to saying goodbye to his dad and then being in the house without him anymore— at least not since Haley took him when they left Hotch. I just wanted to make sure that my little man was okay with saying goodbye to his dad. I was never around for the aftermath of the goodbyes, Haley was the one who had to deal with that. For me, I was so used to getting called in for a case, rushing to drop Jack off at his mom’s house, and then we would race to the office. We never stayed around long enough to make sure that Jack was okay because there simply wasn’t time. But now his dad was gone, and it was just the two of us in that house that was way too big for us.

An idea struck me. “Did you finish your homework, Superman?” I asked, wiping chocolate off his face that had probably been from lunch, and I missed it earlier while still dropping from subspace. He nodded. “Do you want to help me with a case?”

No, I wasn’t going to tell him about the case Hotch just left for. I wasn’t that bad of a parent. But looking for Gideon was important, and it was innocent, as far as I was aware. I figured that Jack would like to put his detective hat on with me for a bit to keep him occupied until dinner. Besides, Gideon was probably just at his cabin, just like Hotch said; but Jack didn’t know that. It could be fun to see how much Jack learned from his dad about being an awesome detective.

Jack nodded eagerly, so I carried him over to the couch and set him down. While he got comfortable, I went to the desk in the living room and grabbed some tape, a stack of flashcards, and two pens. I sat down next to Jack and handed him one of the pens before setting the tape down on the coffee table in front of us.

“Alright, so the case we’re working on is finding out where Uncle Gideon went and why.” 

I knew that as long as I played dumb, I could guide Jack towards the obvious answer that Gideon was at his cabin, but while Jack worked on that, I needed to figure out the why. If there was a reason like just needing some extra time off after Sarah’s death, then, alright, I wasn’t going to get involved. But if we found something out that was concerning, then I was going to drive out there and figure out if he was alright.

“We’ll use these cards whenever we think of something important, and we’ll put them up on the wall. When we put them all together, they’ll make a puzzle that we can solve. Does that sound fun?” I asked with a small smile. Jack nodded and grabbed a few of the index cards. “Okay. So what do we know about Uncle Gideon?”

“He’s smart,” Jack answered giddily. I nodded an encouragement for him to keep going. “He’s brave, just like you and Dad.”

“Alright, why don’t you write down everything you know about him on those flashcards and we’ll talk about it after?”

Jack clicked his pen open and started scribbling as fast as he could. Who knew that all it took to get him to do some work was to tell him that it had to do with a case. I mean, Jack always liked sitting in our office with us while we worked just because he liked to be included and spend as much time with us as possible; but it was hard to actually get him involved with anything we ever worked on because of how mature the topics were. We didn’t exactly want Jack hearing about murder, kidnapping, rape, and so on. We wanted Jack to stay as innocent as possible for as long as possible.

Back to what we were doing, though, while Jack was worried about solving what I already knew about Gideon’s disappearance, I needed to solve why he left. So what did I know about Gideon that would give me the answer? What happened recently that made him want to leave out of the blue and without telling anyone— even Spencer. Gideon and Spencer were the closest of everyone on the team, platonically, at least. Spencer viewed Gideon as a father figure, and Gideon took that to heart, considering what happened with his real son. So if he didn’t tell Spencer, then it meant that something was wrong and he didn’t want anyone to worry. 

There had to be a stressor beyond what happened to Sarah. Gideon waited too long after Frank killed her to leave. Though, he had been upset since that day. He had been quiet, isolating himself, his heart and mind not in the work that he loved to do. He loved to save people, a reason that he kept that journal with him that Frank stole. But he waited to leave. Why? The team got back from a case recently, maybe it had to do with that? But what could possibly happen in a case that would shake the great Jason Gideon?

Hotch told me about the case a bit. He said that there was an Unsub who was killing girls on a college campus, and they knew they had him, but they didn’t have enough evidence to put him away. After their seventy-two hours of holding him in custody for questioning, they had to let him go. When he was gone, however, a girl on the campus who was a fan of his, ended up killing him and then herself.

Why would that upset Gideon, though? What was so different about that case that we hadn’t seen before? A psychopathic teenage girl who killed herself? Why would Gideon care to  _ this  _ extent? Maybe it was something about the girl. Something about her past, or maybe Gideon connected with her somehow during their time on the campus. Or maybe… Gideon mentioned that Sarah was an old college friend of his, maybe— and it was a long shot— maybe there was something about the victims that reminded him of her?

I made sure that Jack was still working on his notes about Uncle Gideon as I grabbed my phone and stepped out of the room to call Garcia. She picked up immediately, which caught me off guard slightly. “You have  _ no  _ idea how happy I am to hear your voice,” she raced through her words.

“I haven’t even said anything yet,” I laughed.

“You just did, and that’s good enough for me. Morgan told me what happened with Strauss. Do you want me to—”

“Garcia, no!” I kept laughing, this time more nervously than humorously. If I would have given her the go ahead, Garcia definitely would have done something to ruin Strauss’s career and life, and while the thought was certainly appealing, we couldn’t  _ actually _ do that. “I’m just calling out the last case the team worked on.”

“The Arizona one?”

“Yeah. Can you tell me about the victimology?”

“Any particular reason?” she asked while her keyboard clacked away.

“Just humor me,” I shrugged.

“As you wish, my love… Let me see what I’ve got here.” She paused for a beat while she searched through her computer for the information I needed about the team’s last case. “Alrighty, here it is. Nathan Tubbs was the suspected Unsub, and it seemed he had a thing for skinny, gorgeous, white, brown eyed, brunette, college girls. Pretty boring, if you ask me. He was stabbing the victims in the chest and then posed them post-mortem—”

“Wait,” I stopped her. “Brown hair and eyes?”

“Yeah. Why? Does that mean something to you?”

Besides the fact that people with brown eyes made up about 70% of the population, and people with brown hair made up about 20%, yes… It actually did mean something. Sarah had brown hair and brown eyes. While that wasn’t exactly special, just as Garcia pointed out, the victims of this case probably reminded Gideon of Sarah. The case was just digging into an already painful wound. Not to mention the displayal of the bodies, which referenced that Tubbs felt remorse for his victims.

“How were the victims displayed?” I asked.

“It looks like they were on their backs, their eyes closed, feet together, arms crossed over their chest— kind of like a mummy, if you will.”

So not only did Tubbs have enough remorse to pose the bodies, but he did it in a way that showed empathy. He saw them as angels, almost. If Gideon saw these victims as mirror images of Sarah, then he probably saw the contrast between Frank’s brutality and Tubb’s empathy. Again, just pouring salt on the wound that Gideon was trying to heal.

“While I’ve got you,” I said, “can you trace Gideon’s cellphone?”

“Already did it earlier when he didn’t show up for the Roundtable meeting this morning.”

“And?”

“It looks like he’s at his cabin,” she said flatly.

Just as I thought, Gideon was out there, trying to escape his problems. And just as I suspected, it was about Sarah. “Thank you, Garcia. If you hear from the team, say ‘hi’ for me?”

“You got it, sweet pea. Now, be free, I must work!” She hung up on me and I buried my phone in my pocket again.

As I walked back into the living room, Jack seemed worn out and bored already. I thought about chuckling, but I decided to keep it to myself. Jack loved his dad and the job we had, and I was sure that Jack was probably going to end up being a cop like his dad; but as a kid who just wanted to have fun all the time, I understood why his attention span didn’t exactly allow him to sit around just writing notes like we were in school or something. He probably expected being a detective and an agent was a little more exciting than this. He wanted the car chases, the shootouts, the bulletproof vests, the on foot Unsub chases, and all of the other entertaining aspects of being a cop that you would see on TV. The reality was, however, that before we could even think about getting to that exciting point, we always had to start with the boring stuff like this. And I think that it disappointed him slightly, which was why he got bored so fast.

“We’re going on a trip, little man. How does that sound?” I asked after my approach caught his attention

Jack perked up. “Did you find Uncle Gideon?”

I nodded. “Grab your tablet, ‘cause it’s gonna be a long drive.”

He jumped off the couch and ran upstairs to grab his tablet and his favorite red dinosaur toy. Meanwhile, I grabbed my purse from the table by the front door. My phone buzzed again and I took a look at the text I got. It was from Hotch, letting me know that they just solved the case and were heading back to the local police station to process the Unsub. I told him that I’d be waiting for him when he would get home. “I love you,” he texted, and I quickly returned the favor.

Jack was already trying to buckle himself into his seat in the car when I sent the last text to Hotch. Before I was even settled in the driver’s seat, Jack was already asking me to turn on the radio. I asked if he had anything in mind, and he said that he wanted to listen to his dad’s favorite station. I obliged, switching the channel until I hit the right one, then started carefully backing out of the driveway.

* * *

As we pulled up to the cabin in the woods on the dirt road, I turned down the radio and took note of how none of the lights were on outside or inside, even though it was getting dark enough to need them— especially out in the woods. 

After parking the car just out front, I turned around in my seat to get a look at Jack. “Stay here, little man. I’ll be back soon.” Jack nodded and looked down at his tablet to continue playing his game.

I got out of the car with the windows cracked a bit for Jack. Since the sun was practically gone and night time was beginning, it wasn’t warm enough to worry about Jack overheating, but still. Besides, I wasn’t planning on being inside for too long. If Gideon was there, I was going to ask if he was alright, talk to him a bit, maybe even see if Jack could sit inside while we talked. If Gideon wasn’t there, however, there was really no point in staying at all.

As I approached the front door, I looked over my shoulder to get another quick glance at the car to make sure that it was still there and Jack was still alright— as if something could have possibly happened within the past ten seconds or so. When everything seemed fine, I looked back to the front door and knocked a couple of times before taking a small step back to wait. A minute or so passed, yet no one came to the door. So I tried again and waited. Still nothing, so I tried the doorknob to see if he had locked up at all.

The door was unlocked and opened with ease as I carefully pushed in. I glanced again over my shoulder to look at the car and saw that Jack was still looking at his tablet. When I looked at the door again, I instinctively reached for my gun on my hip, only to find that there was nothing there. For a moment, I cursed Strauss and this damn suspension.

“Gideon?” I called his name carefully after taking a step into the dark cabin. I reached to the side and blindly searched for the lightswitch on the wall, but even as I found it and flicked it, nothing happened. The power hadn’t been used in a while. “Gideon?” I called again, using my phone’s screen as a flashlight. I should have brought one with me, or used the one from the emergency kit in the car, but I really wasn’t that smart to put it together yet. “It’s just me, Y/N.” Still no response. I shuffled over to the sofa where there was a camp lantern sitting on a table, and turned it on. It was a miracle that I finally had a more powerful light than just my flip phone’s inside screen. “Gideon?” Holding the lantern out in front of me, I walked into the kitchen area.

Sitting on the table ahead of me was a vase of dead flowers with Gideon’s credentials and gun propped up against it. Trapped beneath them, laying right against the table, was an envelope. I cautiously approached, just to triple check that the scene was what I expected it to be. Between the flowers and the gifts, I knew that Gideonn was long gone. He had set up the cabin for someone to find these things and understand that he wasn’t coming back. That was why the power was out, too. He had been gone for who knew how long, and we all just thought that he needed some space. I never in a million years thought that Gideon would just up and leave like this.

I grabbed the envelope, pulling it out from under his badge and gun, and lifted it up to the lamp to get a look at who it was addressed to. Spencer Reid. Of course. Like I said before, Gideon would never leave without telling Reid, that was how close they were. And while Gideon hadn’t given any heads up— probably because he didn’t want to be stopped— he left one last goodbye for the kid he considered to be a son to him. It was a letter just for him, and I had no right snooping, despite the urge to do so. I had my answers about Gideon. I knew why he left, I knew that he wasn’t okay, but I also knew that I would never be able to find him… and even if I did, was there a point in going after him? No. He wasn’t going to come back, no matter how much any of us begged and pleaded.

After I put the letter back down just as I had found it, I turned the lamp off and slowly made my way out of the cabin. The contents in that letter and the gifts that were left were for Reid, no one else. If Gideon wanted it that way, then that was how it was going to be.

I sighed as I got back into the car and flipped my phone open to call Hotch. He was probably already on the jet home, but I figured that I should tell him about Gideon as soon as possible, and that Reid should come out to the cabin, too. Jack was dead asleep in the back seat as I caught a glimpse of him through the rearview mirror to make sure that he was alright. His mouth was open, drool dripping onto the seat belt he was resting his head on. I chuckled quietly at him and made a silent promise to myself that I would get him home as soon as possible.

The call rang a couple of times as Hotch was likely digging around in all of his pockets to find his phone. After a few moments, the ringing stopped and I heard Hotch whisper a “Hello?” into the phone. The team must have been asleep on the jet and he was trying to be courteous by not waking them up when answering my call.

“Hi, baby,” I said into the phone, picking at the leather on the steering wheel to occupy myself.

I heard Hotch sigh with relief. “I’m so glad to hear your voice.” I could practically hear him smiling through the call. “I was going to call, but everyone crashed as soon as we took off. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I just wanted to let you know that Jack and I are out at Gideon’s cabin, and he’s not here.” I looked through the rearview mirror again to make sure that Jack was still asleep. “He’s gone, Hotch. He left a note for Spencer and he ran. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Because of Sarah?”

“I didn’t read the letter, but that’s my best guess.” My gaze was still trained on Jack. “I don’t blame him…”

“What do you mean?”

“If I lost one of you, I wouldn’t want to go back either.”

It was true. Hotch and Jack were my life now. Even if I had my job back now, if I lost one of them, I knew that I could never go back to work without being completely… lost and empty. Even worse was if I were to lose them to an Unsub, just like Gideon lost Sarah to Frank. If that happened, how was I supposed to trust myself to do my job— which was saving lives by putting bad people away— if I couldn’t even save those closest to me? If I didn’t have Jack or Hotch suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I would even be able function. Just being away from Hotch for the day while he was gone on his case felt like the end of the world. I couldn’t imagine having to be away from him any longer than that. I’d probably stop breathing altogether.

“You’re not going to lose us,” Hotch promised quietly, like he was feeling the same aching in his chest that I had. It hurt to even think about the worst. “I won't let anything happen to our family. Do you hear me?” I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “I love you.”

It hadn’t dawned on me quite yet what he said. Subconsciously, I processed his words and found comfort in them, but it wasn’t until he told me he had to go, and we exchanged one “I love you” each, then ended the call that I suddenly realized. It hit me like a train, hearing his words echo in my mind over and over again.  _ Our family _ . He said that he wouldn’t let anything happen to  _ our family _ . Deep down, I knew that I was his family, I guess, because I knew that him and Jack were mine, but to hear him finally say it aloud, I felt some kind of weight lift off my chest. I felt lighter and happier as I ran through what he said again. Our family. It felt like joining a club of sorts. Dating someone who already had a family was odd at first, because I felt like the outsider who had to find my place in the mess; but I liked how things turned out for us. Hotch and I seemed unbreakable and inseparable, I loved Jack like he was my own, and Haley and I actually, somehow, liked each other. There was no tension between me and Jack’s mother, which was probably a bigger relief for Hotch and Jack than for me. But I liked the dynamic, I liked our family. I liked that Hotch finally included me in the club, even though I technically had a membership for the past couple of months.

Was I crazy to be so in love with Aaron Hotchner? He was older than me, he had a son, he was my boss, he was entirely vanilla until he met me, and we seemed glued to the freaking hip. We hadn’t even been dating for that long. Everything happened so fast. I had only been working for him for a month, and suddenly we were going out, and a few months later, I was meeting his son and moving in with him. Were we moving too fast? Was that really why he didn’t want to talk about having kids with me in St. Louis? Perhaps I was a little too blinded by love to see that we were jumping the gun.

No.

We were happy. We were in love. I had never,  _ ever _ felt this way before, and I wasn’t about to start ignoring those feelings. Why would I impede something that was so perfect? We deserved happiness. We deserved what we had. We deserved to move at whatever pace we saw fit, because Gideon and Sarah were proof that nothing was guaranteed. Something horrible could happen to us at any given moment, especially considering our career choice, so it made sense that we would want to have all of each other as fast as possible in order to not miss out anything.

Jack suddenly started snoring, earning a laugh from me as I broke away from my train of thought. I loved him so freaking much, there weren’t enough words to describe. When it came to loving Hotch, it was a fiery passion where I needed to feel, see, and hear him at all times. I needed to be around him 24/7 or I felt like a piece of me was missing. I know that’s, like, anti-feminist ideals— but it was true. Hotch completed a part of me that I didn’t realize I was missing, and without him around, that hole in my soul was impossible to not notice. When it came to loving Jack, though, it was in the kind of way that a mother bear would protect its cub. I knew that Jack wasn’t really my son, and there was always a chance that he could grow to hate me because he could think that I was trying to replace his mother— which I wasn’t, of course— or if Hotch and I ever separated for any reason, I wasn’t required to see Jack ever again. But I knew that I would protect him like he was my own. I would love him like he was my own. He was my family, afterall. He was  _ our family _ . It felt so freaking good to admit that again. Our family.

Honestly, if I didn’t get my job back at the BAU, it didn’t sound horrible to just spend my time looking after Jack whenever we would have custody of him. I liked how we worked the case together. It was like doing junior detective work— or like he would call it “junior Superhero homework”.

As I started the car and turned on the headlights so that we could get home in time to meet Hotch, I heard Jack waking back up. I checked the rearview mirror again to see his eyes fluttering open. He wiped his eyes and looked around to see what was going on. “Are we going home?” he asked tiredly.

“Yeah, little man. Try to get some sleep.”

He nodded and nuzzled up against the seatbelt again. “Hey, Y/N?” I hummed a note that told him I was listening. “I love you.”

My shoulders slumped, my eyes softened, and my heart melted in my chest. “I love you, too, little man. I love you, too.”


	21. RISKS AND REWARDS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Name calling. Brat taming. Fingering. Oral (female receiving). Unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gents, and nonbinary sibs!). Impregnation kink. Cock warming.
> 
> TIMELINE: Right after part twenty.

When Hotch came back from Wisconsin, he scooped me up in his arms before I could say or do anything, and he spun me around until I started feeling sick. I asked him what he could possibly be so happy about, and he told me between lengthy kisses that Strauss gave him his job back because of how well he performed during the case they just got back from. My eyes went wide with joy, and I immediately kissed him back. He spun me around a few more times before deciding that he needed to lay me down before he would get too dizzy and accidentally drop me. 

Jack was already in bed, and I was almost tempted to go wake him up just so that he could see his dad. But Hotch insisted that he just wanted to have some more time alone with me, so I obliged.

We sat on the couch as he explained everything to me. After he left the house, Hotch went to go talk Emily into going with him to Wisconsin since she also hadn’t officially left the unit yet, and he was hoping that it would convince her to stay. Emily gave in, and they flew to Wisconsin together and met up with the team at the Milwaukee Police Department station in the heart of the city. Strauss wasn’t at all happy with their sudden, uncalled for appearance, but she decided to let them stay and reprimand them later for their insubordination.

I kissed Hotch and pulled him over me as he said that. I wished that I could have been there to see the look on Strauss’s face when she realized that they were there and there was nothing she could do about it. Hotch told me that she was shocked but also pissed, and even the falsified image of what she looked like in my head was enough to make me smile ear to ear.

While I fiddled with his belt, Hotch told me that they found the Unsub after the next body was found just after him and Emily landed in Milwaukee. He told me that my profile was what helped them narrow down their search, and they found the guy through his son at the school and the connections he had to all of the mothers. When he got my shirt off, he told me that Strauss didn’t want to send the team into the Unsub’s house, even though they knew that he had another victim inside. Hotch stood his ground. “Just like you taught me to,” he whispered against my neck. And he told Strauss that he was going to send Emily into the house in order to get reasonable cause to send the rest of the team in and make the arrest.

Hotch kissed his way down to my breasts and continued to tell me how Strauss came up to compliment him after made the arrest and I moaned. It was a relief to know that she finally saw that he was actually good at his job and he was a necessary part of the team. He pinched my nipples, which were still sore from playing the other day, and he told me that she offered him his job back right on the spot. He took it, but on the condition that I would get to come back to the BAU. My fingers tangled in his hair and I brought his lips back to mine as I told him how much I love him.

He wasted no time thrusting into me the second my shorts were pulled to the side. We were going to go back to work. We were going to have our jobs back. Our lives were going to be normal again. I was so relieved. All of the worry that we had been drowning in since my initial suspension last week was finally being washed away with every passionate thrust he gave me. We were going to be okay. I didn’t have to be mad at him anymore, though we would still need to talk about him lying to me. But he did everything I could have asked of him, which was to prove that he was the best unit chief the Bureau had. Getting our jobs back just happened to be a nice addition to the reward of putting Strauss in her place.

* * *

I sighed as I reached the top of the steps with the laundry basket in hand. Hotch had been so busy with getting back to work over the past few days that he didn’t have time to keep up with the house like we had been getting used to over the past week or so. I was so proud of him, though, so I had no room to complain. He went back to work the day after his suspension was lifted, and he went to go talk to Strauss about reinstating me. She said that the committee’s investigation into my conduct had already started and was too far in to stop, but she insisted that it looked good for me, and that we could be expecting a call to have me reinstated within the next few days.

Hotch and I had talked about him going behind my back to ask for a transfer from Strauss. Though everything ended up working itself out for us, it didn’t erase the fact that he lied and betrayed my trust. I was honest with him about how I felt about him quitting on the BAU for me, and that the stressor was me sub dropping. I told him that his actions only hurt me compared to his intention, which was to protect me. I told him that I felt betrayed because we spent days telling each other that we would talk about it, but we never ended up getting to it. It was his promise that we would talk about it, and it was his promise that he broke.

It took a lot of apologizing and a lot of convincing me that he thought he was doing the right thing to finally get me to understand and calm down about it. I knew that I couldn’t be mad at him forever for something so small, but he also needed to learn that I wouldn’t just let him get away with lying to me like that. He told me that he would never lie to me again because that was how his marriage with Haley fell apart. He didn’t want us to end up like that. He learned from his mistake and it wasn’t going to happen again. I had to trust that he meant that.

Trust was everything, especially in the kind of relationship we had. It was absolutely imperative that I could trust Hotch in every aspect of our relationship. Romantically, sexually, and professionally. If I couldn’t trust him professionally, then there was a domino effect that would crash into our romance and sex. I needed to know every time we started a scene that he knew my limits and that I could trust him to never hurt me. There had to be complete trust, and he broke that for a bit when I was already vulnerable. So when I explained that to him, I could tell that it stung to hear, but he needed to know. Because how was I any different if I didn’t tell him the truth about how I felt?

Despite how hard it was to have that conversation with one another, it was a necessity. Once it was over and done with, though, Hotch understood entirely how I felt about it, and we were able to move past it. He went up to work on a case in his chair in our room, and I went to do the laundry. We needed a second to ourselves to just sit with what was said and how we were going to move forward. Both of us were mature people who loved each other wholly, and this wouldn’t come between us. We just needed to think. And that was okay.

So as I stepped into the bedroom with the clean laundry load that had just finished, I spotted that Hotch moved from his chair to the bed. He was leaning against the headboard, his legs stretched out in front of him, his ankles crossed over each other, a case file in his lap. He looked up to watch me as I walked into the room. I had changed out of my shorts because they needed to go into the next load in the washer, so I changed into one of Hotch’s blue flannel pajama pants. Like I said, it was my new obsession to wear his clothes around the house, and he still hadn’t opposed it.

I put the laundry basket down on the dresser so that I could sort through what needed to go in which drawers and what needed to go into the closet. When I looked up, I could see Hotch watching me through the mirror; but every time I would catch him, he would look back down at his report like he wasn’t doing anything. I smirked to myself as I folded a pair of his socks together and put them in his drawer. I loved him, even when we were supposed to be mad at each other.

I looked back up again and caught Hotch biting his bottom lip while staring at my ass. I rolled my eyes and bent down a little dramatically in order to put a pair of my socks away. Hotch shifted on the bed, bringing the file up on his lap to cover his tightening pants. When I stood back up, I continued doing the rest of the laundry without looking at him or making another move like that.

“Thank you, by the way” Hotch smiled at me through the mirror. I turned around with confusion written all over my face. What on Earth did he have to thank me for? I had been so… _useless_ and grumpy since being put on suspension. I didn’t deserve any praise of any kind. “You’ve been so patient and understanding throughout all of this, even when you really didn’t have to be. You stepped up to make the best of the situation, and there aren’t enough words to express how much that has helped me.”

“Aaron… I…”

What was I supposed to say to that? I didn’t even realize that was how I had been or how Hotch felt about it. I was just being _me_. “Stepping up” didn’t even feel like the right way to praise me. There were about three to four days where all I did was mope around, and then when I found out that he lied to me, I practically threw a tantrum. I had been the worst throughout all of this, not the best. But he seemed so adamant on complementing behaviors I didn’t even realize I had.

He crawled to the end of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “Come here,” he said, patting his lap.

I dropped what I was doing at the dresser and warily approached him. He was being weird, right? Aaron Hotchner just got his job back, and he was being… calm about it— heck, he wasn’t even racing to get back to the office yet. He was just sitting there, watching me and talking to me. There were a million and one reasons to be worried, then. Not only did Hotch know about my behaviors, but I knew about his, and this wasn’t at all what I expected from him.

I slid onto his lap, my legs bracketing his thighs, my arms snaking around his neck while he held my waist tightly to make sure I wouldn’t fall off. Hotch pressed into me as he kissed my lips deeply and passionately, both of us sucking in a deep breath through our noses while still connected. While he slid his tongue into my mouth to claim dominance, my fingers started running through his dark hair, tugging gently every so often whenever I felt myself need him more.

Before I knew it, though, Hotch brought a gentle hand up to my neck and pushed me away from our kiss. I tried to catch my breath the best I could while staring down at him. The two of us were worse than a pair of rabbits, there was no denying it, but I didn’t expect this from our morning. I thought that, if anything, he would have taken me out of the house to get breakfast to celebrate or something. But I guess that I shouldn’t have been too surprised, either, considering how frequently we needed to feel each other. If there was ever a fleeting thought of possibly fucking one another, there was a great chance that it would happen shortly after. Hotch probably saw me standing at the dresser, had one of those fleeting thoughts, and decided that he was going to have me. I wasn’t about to stop him.

“You’ve been so good, baby girl,” he leaned back in and kissed the clear space on my neck above where his thumb was gently pressing into my skin. My eyes fluttered shut at the feeling. “I want to give you a reward. Anything of your choosing.” He kissed the other side of my neck. “Let me thank you.”

I nodded eagerly against his touch, and then the next thing I knew, he was standing up, carrying me in his arms. He spun around, still kissing my neck and jawline, then he carefully started laying me back down on the bed. My head hit the comforter carefully and I smiled up at him. A realization hit me like a train: I loved him and trusted him. He only wanted what was best for me. He thought that getting a transfer so that I could get my job back was good for me. I couldn’t blame him for that. It was like making a call in the field. He did what he thought was right, and he learned from the mistake he made. If I trusted his calls in the field, I could trust him now.

He ran his cold hands under my shirt to keep them warm as he asked me, “What first?”

“Your shirt,” I didn’t hesitate.

I wanted to see him so bad— all of him. Usually, Hotch spent the majority of his time focusing on getting my pants off, and that was about it. That was unless he was tying me up. But Hotch was normally an eager person, so when it came down to clothes, he would work around them to get what he really wanted. Then this reward came along and I knew that I wanted to see all of him so that when he was inevitably going to be hovering over me, his eyes glued to mine, his hips bucking against mine until we were both a moaning mess, I wanted to see him flexing as he got close or as he focused on pleasing me.

Hotch leaned up, sliding his hands out from under my shirt, and he slowly started pulling his navy blue nightshirt over his head. I gulped at the sight of him. He wasn’t Superman ripped, but did that matter? Hotch worked out almost every day to make sure that he was fit for the field, and that he could “keep up with the youngins”. He wasn’t even that fucking old and he acted like he was already at the age in need of a walker. So because he had it in his mind that he needed to work harder in order to keep up with the rest of the team, and more so with me and Jack outside of work, Hotch made sure he was fit as he could be… and… Wow. I always took notice of it, but there was something about staring at him when I knew what was about to come.

I reached out and ran a hand over his chest, feeling how hard he tensed under my touch. He was always so much more sensitive than I was. Even the lightest of innocent touches could set me on fire, but Hotch… if his eyes even _lingered_ for long enough, he was a goner. Touching him without having my hand torn away and pinned over my head was a complete miracle.

“What now?” He shivered and hovered back over me so that he could stare right into my eyes.

His hands slid back under my shirt, and this time it was my turn to shiver. I leaned up slightly and kissed him as hard as I could while fidgeting with his pants. Usually, it was at this point that Hotch would move away from me to make sure that I wasn’t getting too eager, but this was my reward, and he wanted whatever I wanted. If I wanted to get into his pants as fast as possible, no foreplay, then he was going to let me. That made me want him more, in the strangest way.

“My shirt,” I begged through our kiss, “and my pants. Please.”

He took my plea as more of an order. The hands that had been hiding under my shirt worked their way up, scrunching the bottom half of the fabric up at his wrists. I suddenly moaned into his mouth when he cupped my breasts and started massaging them lightly. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I wanted him to strip me of my clothes, but, _fuck_ , I wasn’t going to stop or correct him.

When I managed to untie the hem of his pajama pants, I started pushing them down his body, yearning for what was waiting underneath. Hotch hissed slightly as his erection sprang free, and I could briefly feel him grinding up against my thigh for more. This wasn’t at all his speed, and it was obvious. Hotch had two settings: so fast and hard that I wouldn’t be able to walk right for a few days, or so torturously slow that I made a mess of the bed and I was nothing but a broken record of pleas and moans for hours. If it were up to him that morning, I probably would have been cuffed to the headboard, gagged, and blindfolded as he had his way with me for hours. While that thought was _definitely_ appealing, and that would have to be an afternoon event, I just wanted him to shower me with the love he so clearly wanted to give me.

Hotch pulled my shirt off the rest off the way, and as my hands went directly back between us to palm his erection, he moved away ever so slightly. I groaned, bucking my hips around, but he pushed me onto the bed with more force than I was expecting, making me yelp slightly. I bit my lip as I relaxed in order to watch him pull my pants off slowly.

“You have to stop wearing my clothes,” he whispered before kissing my exposed thighs once the pants were to my knees.

“Why?” I moaned, grabbing onto his hair.

“Because it drives me wild.”

“That’s not a bad—” I gasped as his fingers ghosted over my clit as a slight punishment for talking back, but I didn’t relent. I wanted to push my luck as far as I could. “That’s not a bad thing.”

Hotch hid a grin by kissing my calves after pushing my pants to my ankles. When my pants were entirely off, and they had been thrown to the far side of the room, Hotch inched his way back up so that his face was even with mine.

“What do you want, Y/N?” he asked quietly, tucking some of my hair behind my ear.

“You.”

“Be specific, baby girl, or it doesn’t count.”

His fingers were slowly running lines up and down my thighs and all I could think about was how they would feel inside me. They were so long, and so, _so_ fucking thick… The veins on his arms and hands always made me feral, and thinking about him flexing his arm every time he pumped his fingers into me… I… Fuck.

“Your fingers,” I begged. “Please. I want your fingers.” I bucked my hips up, earning a rough smack on my thigh to push me back down. “Please,” I begged again, staying as still as I could.

Hotch smirked, “Try to stay still. Use your manners, moan however much you want and as loud as you want— I want to hear you screaming for me.” I gulped. “And ask for permission to cum. Do you understand?”

I nodded, “Yes, Sir.” It was going to be damn near impossible to not move without restraints, but I had to try my best. Besides, restraints weren’t a bad idea if it came down to it.

One of Hotch’s hands grabbed mine, and he intertwined our fingers, then gave me a gentle squeeze. I stared at his dark, lust filled eyes, and kept my focus right on him as his other hand inched up my thigh and towards my dripping pussy. I was already a fucking mess for him and he had hardly even touched me. No one else could compare in that way. No one else in my life ever made me that desperate, and no one else could do it without even touching me. Hotch was so special in a thousand different ways, but it was always a thought I had, especially when I would suddenly feel how wet I was for him.

“You’ve been so good,” he whispered, his thumb finding my clit and rubbing small, gentle circles. I threw my head against the bed. “And you’re already so wet for me… I bet if I just…” He slid two fingers into me with ease. He chuckled, “I figured.” He pushed into me all the way and immediately curled them to find my g-spot. I gasped, whipping my head back up, and instinctively grabbing his wrist. Just like I said, the veins were right against my touch as he flexed his arm to keep fucking me with his fingers, despite the fact that I had a grip on him. “I told you to stay still,” he let go of my hand so that he could pry off my hold on his wrist. “Give me the other one.”

I internally screamed, cursing myself for moving at all. However, I still did as I was told, giving my other hand to Hotch. He kept curling his fingers inside of me, just slower now, while he collected my wrists together, then pinned them over my head. Despite this all being about rewarding me, he knew that he still had to show some form of domination because that was what made us— and specifically our sex— special. Besides, he knew that I liked it, so, technically, he was still rewarding me.

“Tell me what you want, baby girl,” he insisted again.

“Make me cum, Sir, please.”

He grinned, knowing he had won some kind of game he put together in his head. He was rewarding me, but it was still a perk for him to hear me begging for what I wanted most. Still grinning like a mad man, though, Hotch ducked down and licked my clit slowly and gently.

“Sir,” I moaned quietly.

He licked again and started working his fingers in and out of me at a faster pace. My hands found the pillows above my head, and without mobility to grab onto anything else while Hotch pinned me down, I grabbed onto the fabric of the pillowcases as hard as I could. Hotch’s grasp around my wrists tightened as he fucked me harder with his long fingers and his mouth locked around my sensitive clit, turning me into the moaning mess he was hoping for.

“Just like that, Sir,” I encouraged. “Please.”

Hotch’s fingers curled up inside of me, hitting my g-spot again, earning a loud moan that echoed through the house. He wanted to hear me scream for him, and we were slowly getting to that point. If he didn’t let up soon, I was going to cum, and I was going to scream his name until I lost my voice. That was what he wanted, though, right? He wanted me to lose control and just be his again. He wanted to remind me that despite any bumps in the road, we could work through anything because he loved me more than anything. There was passion, there were kisses, there were a million ways to say “I love you” to each other, but nothing compared to hearing each other moan one another’s names. There was something about knowing that you gave them so much pleasure that all they could think about was your name gliding off their tongue again and again that made it worth the bumps in the road.

His tongue flicked over my clit, sending another shiver up my spine. I tugged at his grip on my wrists, but he didn’t let go. So, I decided to play the only card I had: my reward. “I want to touch you. Please…”

Hotch groaned against my pussy, making me clench around his fingers. He released my hands, and they immediately shot to his hair. My fingers tangled in the long strands of his black hair as I tried my hardest to keep him close. I craned my neck up to get a look at him, and he stared at me through his lashes, still smirking against my clit. Asshole…

“Don’t stop,” I begged, squeezing my thighs around his head as I began to feel the familiar knot tightening in my stomach. “Sir—” He spread his fingers inside me slightly, stretching me just like his cock would. “Aaron!” I screamed, pulling on his hair. He moaned against me and worked harder to make me scream his name again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Just when I caught on that he was spelling his name with his tongue on my clit, I felt how close I was and knew that I was going to cum soon. “Sir, may I cum, please?” He eyed me through his lashes and nodded slightly. I pulled at his hair again as I felt myself tipping over the edge. “Aaron!” He kept lapping his tongue at my clit as I came around his fingers, helping me ride out my high as I bucked around and held him close. My legs shook, my thighs releasing his head, my moans turning into breathless gasps.

When I calmed down, Hotch slowed his movements, waiting until the last second to slowly pull his fingers from my core. He brought his fingers up to my mouth, and I took a moment to notice the vein running down his arm and how his muscles constricted as he curled his fingers against my tongue. As I tasted myself on his fingers, Hotch licked my slit, up and down, over and over again, cleaning up the mess he made of me. My grip didn’t let up until he finally retreated from me entirely and I could catch my breath.

He pulled his fingers out of my mouth and replaced the touch with his lips pressing against mine with desperation. I tasted more of myself on his tongue, making both of us moan nearly simultaneously. He grabbed my hands again with his and held them against the mattress as he ground his hips against mine again, his erection pressing against my slit.

“Tell me what you want, baby girl,” he said again.

I squeezed his hands. “Fuck me.”

His lips were back on mine in an instant. I let out a breath through my nose since he got me so off guard, but then I started kissing him back with even more force. “Fuck me, _what_?” he asked when he parted from me suddenly.

“Fuck me, _Sir_.”

“Good girl.”

Without using his hands, he guided his length to my entrance and slowly slid into me. It wasn’t like the other day when he first rediscovered the box, or the days after that where he wanted to try everything else in there. During those days of exploration, Hotch had fucked me rough and fast to make sure I was a mindless, moaning mess. But this time, he went slow to make sure I felt every inch as he whispered in my ear that he loved me. And I really did feel every inch. After my first orgasm, I was still tight and sensitive, and it made him groan in my ear to feel me clench around his girth.

“I love you,” he mumbled against my lips. I echoed his words as he bottomed out inside of me, giving me every inch of him all at once. “You’re so tight,” he whined, pulling back. I squeezed his hands as his thrusts started getting sloppy. “All mine…”

“I’m yours,” I moaned. “Yours, Sir.”

He moaned with relief upon hearing my desperate moans and agreements. “Say it again.”

“I’m yours, Aaron Hotchner. All yours. Only yours.”

“Every inch of you is mine.”

I nodded before kissing him again while grinding my hips against his to encourage him to keep going. His thrusts kept getting sloppier, a sign that he was getting close. I looked down between us, catching a glance at his chest holding tight as he focused on hitting every spot inside me that we both needed. His biceps were flexing as his hands continued to pin mine down, our fingers still intertwined and squeezing. This was exactly what I wanted. This was my reward, and I couldn’t think about anything other than how much I loved him.

“Claim me as yours,” I begged. He knew what that meant, and it drove him absolutely wild. An animalistic groan left his throat as he tried fucking me harder in order to chase both of our orgasms. “Make me cum for you, please—” Before I could even finish asking, Hotch let go of one of my hands and brought his fingers down to my clit as he continued thrusting into me with newfound speed and strength. I tightened around him, bucking my hips around as euphoria overtook me. “Sir!” I cried out, screwing my eyes shut. His fingers were working hard and fast on my clit, taking advantage of the fact that it was still sensitive from my first orgasm. “I’m close…” My hand, which had been freed by Hotch, shot up to the headboard, and I grabbed on for dear life as the knot started to build.

Hotch moaned, working faster somehow. Maybe it was a good thing that he worked out as often as he did. Maybe I needed to start training with him—

I moaned again as he hit my g-spot on purpose.

“Cum on my cock,” he encouraged. “Cum for me.” He leaned down and forced my mouth open with his tongue. “Cum,” he moaned into my mouth. The order he gave me sent me over the edge. My knuckles turned white against his grip on one hand and the headboard in the other. I thrusted up, meeting his hips, riding out my orgasm, squeezing my walls around him. “Fuck—“ he groaned, giving me one hard thrust. “Fuck, fuck—“ He gave another one. “I love you—“ He snapped his hips forward one last time as he came inside of me. 

I draped my free arm around his neck, holding him close to me as he hid his face in the crook of my neck while he came down from his high. He bucked his hips slightly, just trying to feel more of me as he finished cumming. He buried himself in me entirely as he let his hips slump against mine. I smiled at the ceiling as I played with the ends of his hair, thinking to myself that we could stay like that forever and I wouldn’t mind a single bit.

“Mine,” he whispered against my skin.

I didn’t realize that Hotch was so _possessive_. I mean, I should have guessed since he was so protective and controlling, and he liked marking me as his whenever we fucked; but I didn’t realize that his possessiveness had reached this point. I loved it. I liked meaning enough to someone that I was only theirs. I liked knowing that I could trust the man I called mine. I liked trusting and loving Aaron.

Hotch collapsed on the mattress, finding just enough space beside me to safely land before pulling me into his arms. I hugged my arms around his bare and sweaty chest before adjusting to rest my head on his shoulder. He kissed the top of my head and held me close. We were both still panting, but it was nice and calming, somehow. I found that the more I relaxed against his rising and falling chest, the more peace I found in the silence hanging in the air. I felt at home while his arm body comforted me and he rubbed gentle circles on my back with his fingertips, and his cock was still sitting deep within me.

I kissed his collarbone, dragging my hand up and down his chest to feel how he kept tensing under my touch. His muscles were so tight, so sensitive, so perfect. I silently wished that we could stay like that forever. I wanted to be trapped in his arms, both of us still catching our breaths, sweaty, tense, and sore. I wanted him to stay buried inside of me forever so that I could always feel full with his length and cum. I wanted the constant reminder that I was his and that he was mine, and that we loved each other.

Hotch and I both groaned as my phone on my bedside table started ringing. It definitely wasn’t work, so I silently begged him to not pick it up because there was no reason to see who it was. Habits were habits, though, and Hotch had to answer every call we got, no matter what— even if it was on my phone. So he reached over me and answered the call since I was too stubborn to do it.

“Agent Greenaway’s phone,” he greeted with a smile meant just for me. As he waited to hear what the other side of the call had to say, he leaned in and kissed my neck until I finally broke into a giggle and pushed him away. “Chief Strauss—” He pulled out of me and sat up in an instant. I whined quietly at the loss of his cock inside me, and lightly hit his arm to let him know that I wanted him back. “I— Yeah. Let me put them on for you.” He took the phone away from his ear and looked at me with fearful eyes. I bit back a laugh. It wasn’t like Strauss wasn’t aware of our relationship, but it was funny to see him freaking out about picking up a call from our boss on _my_ phone. “It’s about your reinstatement.”

My smile faded and I snatched the phone from him. “Chief Strauss,” I greeted. “Sorry, I was busy doing dishes.” I looked at Hotch and shrugged, wondering if that lie was sufficient enough. He also shrugged, though, which wasn’t fucking helpful.

“I have good news. Your evaluation has been completed earlier than expected. The committee has decided to reinstate you.”

My smile reappeared and I hid my face in Hotch’s chest to hide how ecstatic I was. “That’s great news, ma’am. Thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Agent Morgan,” she said sourly.

I raised a brow against Hotch’s chest. “Ma’am?”

“Your reinstatement was not my decision. I happened to be out voted because Agent Morgan went over my head to talk to the committee in order to fight on your behalf.”

Derek Morgan, you son of a bitch. You glorious, magnificent, loyal son of a bitch. Friday night, I was going to take him to the bar, and I was going to pay for every drink he wanted. There weren’t enough words in the world to express how grateful I was of him. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to risk his own career in order to fight for mine. I swear, if I wasn’t in bed with Hotch still, I would have found Morgan and kissed him.

“A word of the wise, Agent Greenaway,” Strauss continued, “keep your head down. Make sure you’re the only one answering your phone. And don’t give me another reason to suspend you.”

I rolled my eyes. She was such a thorn in my side, I swear. “Thank you, Chief Strauss.”

“I hate to ask, but is Aaron still there?”

“Yeah,” I answered, leaning back from his chest to point at the phone, a signal that she was talking about him. He raised a brow and I shrugged again. “Would you like to speak with him?”

“Why else would I ask?”

I rolled my eyes again and handed the phone to Hotch. He watched me carefully as he brought the phone back to his ear. I searched his face for any hint of what they were talking about. I was just trying to gauge if it was good or bad news, or if it was just something simple about work. When Hotch perked up and smiled, I immediately recognized that it was more good news outside of our reinstatements.

“Thank you for letting me know,” he told Strauss as they began wrapping up their call. “Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be sure to talk to Dave tomorrow.” He kept nodding. “Alright. Thanks. Bye.”

After hanging up the call with Strauss, Hotch stretched to put my phone back on my bedside table. My eyes still followed his, trying to understand what was going on. Who was Dave? Why did Hotch seem so excited about what Strauss said? My mind was racing with endless questions, but also with the fact that I was getting my job back… Morgan went out of his way to help me, and I was going to be back at work before I knew it. Things were looking up again after being so shit for the past week.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“You first,” he insisted, wrapped me in his arms again.

I rolled my eyes slightly, playfully annoyed by his teasing. “I get to go back to work tomorrow because Morgan went to talk to the committee without Strauss there to stop him. Now you.”

“Have you ever heard of David Rossi?”

Oh, my fucking— “You mean, like, _the_ David Rossi?” I asked while pushing myself back out of his arms.

My shock was clear, but Hotch seemed giddy. His smile was so bright, and he looked as excited as I had ever seen him. Of course I knew who David Rossi was. He was a great agent back in his day, he even helped start up the BAU. From what I understood, him and Hotch were old friends,-- just like my dad was with Gideon, but I had never met Rossi. Despite my efforts to get into every one of his guest lectures at the Academy, I could never get in, even with my dad trying to find an extra seat with his connections. David Rossi was a _legend_ , there was no doubt about it.

I pressed for more answers, “What about him?”

“He’s coming out of retirement. He’s rejoining the BAU because Gideon’s officially out.”

“I—” I didn’t know what to say. Things were really, _really_ , finally looking up for us. With our reinstatements and the addition of Rossi to the team, it seemed like things couldn’t get better. There wasn’t much I could say as words seemed to fail me; but there was one thing that made sense to express how happy and relieved I was that things were coming together and siding with us for once. “I love you.” I leaned in and kissed his lips.

Hotch tangled his fingers in my hair as he held me close for a moment until we needed to part in order to catch our breath. “I’m going to have to talk to Morgan about going over Strauss’s head, but… I’m glad someone was able to do something.”

Morgan… That beautiful son of a bitch that I was indebted to forever.

I escaped Hotch’s arms again, this time hearing him whine at the loss, and I grabbed my phone. Hotch propped his chin on my shoulder, watching as I pulled up my texts and found Morgan’s contact. I clicked our messages and started writing to him: “Asshole.” Hotch chuckled in my ear, surprised that I was so upfront and hostile with Morgan; but that was how we were. We teased each other in a mean way, but it was all in good fun. Hotch knew that Morgan and I worked well together and that we were close, which was why he paired us up the most. If I wasn’t with Hotch for one reason or another, I was probably with Morgan, and if that weren’t the case, then the last resort was Emily. My field partner through and through, the one who always had my back no matter what, was Derek Morgan. I trusted him with my life out on the field, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t give him a rough time for being a total tool and asshat sometimes. Someone needed to give him push back when Garcia was giving him all the attention he craved. I wasn’t afraid to bite back.

My phone buzzed as Morgan responded. Hotch and I read it quickly. “What did I do this time?” he asked. He was always so guilty, geez.

I typed back, “You’re such an idiot. You shouldn’t have gone over Strauss’s head.”

“But it worked. Didn’t it? ;)”

“A wink?” Hotch inquired, grabbing my phone from me.

I laughed and reached to retrieve it, but his long arms held it just out of my range. I put my hand on his upper thigh to catch him off guard, and it worked. Hotch tensed up and groaned at how close my hand was to his crotch, and his arm instinctively fell out of the air. I grabbed my phone before he could reposition or push me off.

“Are you jealous, Agent Hotchner?” I teased. He scoffed and shook his head. “After what we just did?” Hotch wasn’t laughing anymore. I doubled back with a gulp. “Okay, so you remember how you said that this was about rewarding me—” Hotch still didn’t smile. “I love you?” I said warily. He squinted. “So… I’m going to call Haley, see if we can drop Jack off with her tonight while we go celebrate at a fancy restaurant…” I started sliding off the bed, but Hotch caught me and pulled me close.

He stared at me for a moment before whispering, “I love you more than anything, Y/N. You know that, right?”

I nodded. “Of course I know.”

“Call Haley. We’re staying in, though.” He leaned forward and slowly… tenderly… lovingly kissed my lips. “And get the box.”

I gulped, hesitating another moment as our lips stayed so close to one another that I could feel his breath on my face. “I love you.” I pecked his lips with another kiss before escaping off the bed to get dressed, call Haley, get Jack ready to go to his mom’s house, then grab the black box for Hotch.


	22. THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: A few days after part twenty-one.

Hotch had been laughing to himself all morning while watching me limp slightly around the house. My comment about him being jealous got me in some trouble— well, _a lot_ of trouble— and when I woke up in the morning with Hotch to get ready for work, I finally felt how sore I was. It wasn’t _that_ bad, but it was certainly noticeable and Hotch seemed amused by how I was trying to hide it so as to not give him any pleasure, but also to practice for trying to look somewhat normal for my first day back to work. Working with a team of profilers was bad for our personal life, anyhow, because they could always read us like a book; but, for the most part, Hotch and I managed to get away with the secrets of our sex life thus far. We could keep it up, right? I mean, as long as I didn’t collapse at the memories of what happened last night.

When we got out of the car at work, Hotch tried to keep a straight face when he saw me wobble on the sidewalk. I gave him a look that side: “This is all your fucking fault, asshole”, which finally broke Hotch again for the briefest of moments. By the time we entered the building, however, I managed to find a pace that was comfortable but still normal enough to catch eyes. I swear, I hated him and his dumb grin as we got into the elevator.

“New heels or something?” he asked me snarkily.

I glared up at him. “You know, I can just bury or burn the box.”

“Yeah, but then I’d never let you cum again.”

The elevator dinged as we approached our floor, and Hotch stepped out without uttering another word. I watched him walk away from me for a second, my jaw practically on the floor. I really thought I did something there by threatening the box, but Hotch was already a step ahead. If my legs weren’t already weak enough, his words nearly made me collapse. After being locked up in the house for just over a week with nothing to do but sit around, watch TV, look after Jack, and fuck Hotch, my mind wasn’t back in the rules yet. We had boundaries, and they were more important than ever now that Strauss was watching the pair of us like a hawk.

When the elevator doors started to close on me, I jumped through the gap and stumbled into the lobby outside of the BAU. Hotch was standing at the glass doors, still grinning as he waited for me to approach. He opened the door for me and watched as I stepped in. The team was there, and they took notice of my arrival, but no one came to say anything to me yet.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Hotch asked sincerely now, referring to the meeting I was meant to have with Strauss within the next few minutes. I shook my head. “Okay,” he nodded, accepting my answer. “I’ll be in my office. This time, though, don’t go storming off.”

“I hate you,” I whispered, pivoting to walk towards the back of the office where the hallway to Strauss’s office was located.

The bullpen was still quiet as everyone watched me pass by, ignoring that Hotch took another path to get up to his office. Anderson traded places with me in the doorway, holding it open for me for an extra second before continuing on towards his desk. There were other agents who worked in the building, not specifically with the BAU, but for the Director’s office down the hallway, or for the special crimes unit to the left. Between those offices, however, was Strauss’s office.

I sighed as I knocked on the door, waiting for her to welcome me in. I didn’t waste any time standing around in the hallway, waiting around to second guess myself or something. It was probably better to just get this over with as fast as possible. The sooner I was done with Erin Strauss, the better. I wanted to avoid her for the rest of my life, if at all possible. 

“Come in,” she said from inside. I opened her office door, stepped in, and closed it behind me. Strauss was sitting at her desk, glasses on the end of her nose as she read a report, a scowl upon her face. “Agent Greenaway.”

I nodded slightly to say hello. “Chief Strauss.”

“Let’s not drag this on.” She opened up the top drawer of her desk. “My words of wisdom yesterday still stand. You’re on thin ice. I suggest keeping your head down.” She put my gun and badge on the desk. I reached out for them, but she moved them back ever so slightly to warn me away from taking them yet. “One slip up, and we’ll be right back where we started. Are we clear, Agent Greenaway?”

“Chief Strauss, with all due respect, I don’t make mistakes. I do my job. So, let me do it.” I grabbed my things from her and left her office without another word. She was so annoying… I wasn’t taking it anymore. This had gone far enough. I knew that I still had to give her a modicum of respect, but that didn’t mean I had to give her my undivided attention.

As I turned into the hallway with my head down so that I could put my gun back in its holder on my hip, I happened to run straight into someone. After the initial collision, we both took steps back to recover, and I immediately stopped fidgeting with my gun so that I could focus on apologizing for not looking. When I looked up, however, I found myself at a loss for words—completely starstruck and unsure of how to proceed. David Rossi was standing in front of me, a polite, apologetic smile on his face as he waited for a quick exchange of apologies, but nothing left me. I ran into David Rossi… Oh… Oh no… Oh, I was the absolute worst. This wasn’t at all how I imagined our first encounter. No, no, no…

“Sorry about that,” Rossi apologized, realizing that I knew who he was and was therefore unable to find any words. “Are you alright?” I nodded, still unsure if I could utter a single word. He looked over his shoulder to see that the path I was on led towards the BAU, where he had just arrived from. “Are you from the BAU?” he asked, trying to spark up polite conversation. I nodded again and his polite smile widened. “I’m David Rossi.”

“I…” Geez, I needed to get over it and pick my jaw up off the floor. “Agent Y/N Greenaway.” I held out my hand for a handshake.

“Greenaway? Oh, you’re Hotch’s girl,” he said as he accepted my hand and shook it shortly.

“Partner, actually.”

“Pardon?”

“I go by ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns, not the female ‘she’ and ‘her’ pronouns.”

“Oh… Well, that’s certainly… interesting.”

We both stood up straight as we let go of our handshake. I smiled politely at him, understanding that it wasn’t a common thing and wasn’t easily understood. Hell, it took Hotch a while to get it, too. He tried his hardest, and if he ever slipped up and didn’t catch it, Elle would remind him. By the time she was gone, however, no one on the team slipped up anymore, meaning there was no need to be hypervigilant. It just came naturally at some point. That was the whole point.

Having to continuously explain it was exhausting, which was why I hardly ever took the time to correct people. There was no point in standing around all day telling random local law enforcements, or witnesses, or Unsubs in custody that they were misgendering me. And there really wasn’t the time, either. But if there were people who were going to be a part of my life, like my family, my friends, the team, Hotch, Jack, Haley, and so on, then, yeah, I was going to take the time to make sure they knew and were corrected if they made a mistake. It was a personal choice of mine to nitpick like that, but it worked for me, and I wasn’t about to change that.

When it came to Rossi, he was going to be the next member of our team— of our little work family. It would take time to get to know him, and for him to really become one of us, but it was inevitably going to happen, and he needed to know the truth sooner than later. Besides, it was probably better hearing it from me first compared to Hotch, who was likely going to be on edge, stepping up to the post that Elle abandoned. Even though he respected Rossi, and was likely going to be understanding of the fact that it would take time to fall into habit, Hotch was… protective. It didn’t matter how many times I could possibly tell Hotch to not be protective and overbearing, he was still going to do it. He had always been like that since the Fisher King.

“Well,” Rossi smiled back slightly, “it’s been a pleasure meeting you. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly before continuing on his path towards Strauss’s office.

My eyes followed him, my head turning over my shoulder slightly to do so. He didn’t look back after leaving me and before walking into Strauss’s office. When he was out of sight, I sighed to myself, and pivoted so that I could walk back towards the BAU. I pushed through the glass door, taking note of how everyone in the bullpen immediately turned away from their huddle in order to gauge what was going on with me. Morgan stood from his seat to get a better look, or maybe even to try and catch my attention so that I would potentially go over and talk to them, but I didn’t. I kept heading straight, taking larger strides up the ramp to keep up my momentum.

When I entered Hotch’s office, I immediately closed the door and collapsed on his couch. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Hotch watching me through his eyelashes. I sighed as I threw my arm over my head, hiding my face in my elbow.

“I see you have your gun and badge back,” he said, returning his focus to his work. I nodded and sighed again. “So, what’s wrong, then?”

“I met Rossi.”

Hotch let out a slight chuckle. “That bad?”

“He caught me off guard… I made a total fool of myself…” I sat back up. “I corrected him about my pronouns, and he looked at me like I was insane.”

Hotch put down his bed as he chuckled once more. “You _are_ insane, but he doesn’t know that yet. I’m sure you’re fine.”

“Ha. Ha,” I feigned laughing at his joke, rolling my eyes.

“It’ll be alright,” he said seriously. “Rossi will just have to get used to it. He’s a bit old fashioned, but he’ll come around eventually.”

I didn’t let up with my obvious worry, though. I had totally fucked up Rossi’s first impression of me, and the gender thing didn’t help. I mean, I couldn’t blame myself. I did what I thought was right, I corrected him on something that was important to me, even though it ended up making me look like an idiot. Of course David Rossi wouldn’t get it. Why would I—

“Hey,” Hotch caught my attention. I looked up at him slowly. “I’ll handle it. I promise.”

I sighed with relief but also in a futile attempt to get rid of my worry. “Can you shoot me first?” I slumped against the back cushions of the couch and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe then I won’t be so embarrassed.”

“You told me the other day that I’d be bored without you here. If I shoot you, I’d have no one around to keep me occupied.”

“You’re being a suck up.”

“Yeah, well, at least I’m never a brat like—”

The office door suddenly flew open without so much as a knock or a warning. Hotch adjusted himself in his seat and I sat up straight as Strauss walked in. I took notice of how she quickly moved to the side, letting her guest walk in, too. When Hotch realized who it was who had come to his office, his face brightened, and he stood up to greet an old friend.

“Agent Hotchner—” Strauss began as Hotch made his way around his desk.

“Dave,” Hotch greeted, smile widening as he opened his arms to embrace Rossi.

“How are you, Aaron?” Rossi smiled back.

“I’m good. I’m good.” They embraced tightly. “It’s so great to see you again,” Hotch said, patting Rossi’s back. As they parted, Hotch pointed to me, “I take it that you met Y/N earlier.” I stood at the mention of my name, ignoring how Strauss took note of my unnecessary presence.

“Yeah. She seems like a real catch,” Rossi joked, jabbing Hotch’s side with his elbow.

Hotch chuckled shortly before falling flat. “ _They_ , Dave. _They_ are quite a catch.”

“Right, sorry.” Rossi leaned in, “You’re gonna have to explain this one to me at some point.”

Hotch smiled again, “I’ll tell you on the plane.”

“Plane? We have a plane now?”

“You missed a lot, old man.” He swung his arm over Rossi’s shoulder in a teasing, yet still friendly way. They looked like young friends in high school, so nonchalant, so relaxed, so oblivious to the professionalism they both held dear.

Strauss cleared her throat awkwardly. “I’ll, um, let you two catch up, then.” She knew when she wasn’t wanted around, thankfully, so she took her leave as fast as possible in order to avoid any awkwardness.

Hotch thanked her as the three of us watched her head down the ramp towards her office. When it was just the three of us, Hotch squeezed Rossi’s shoulders for a few moments before releasing him. “So how long has it been? And don’t make me look that old in front of Y/N.”

They both turned to me with laughing smiles. I had never seen Hotch like this. I mean, of course I had seen him smile and laugh plenty of times, but never at work, and never with friends. It took him a long while to warm up to the idea of smiling around me, and I really only started to notice the difference between smiling at me in a friendly manner— like we had done throughout the years when we would pass by each other’s offices— and smiling at me because he wasn’t sure how else to express how much he loved me in an innocent way. But this smile… It mirrored his high school pictures, That same kind of naive youth possessed Hotch as he probably began remembering all of the good times he had with Rossi back in the day.

“You’ll always be old,” I told Hotch with a short smile. It wasn’t like his, but it was in a playful way that said: “I’m going to make your life hell after last night.”

“I see why Hotch likes you,” Rossi complimented me. “Let’s see, what was it?” He turned back to Hotch. “Dinner three years ago. But— and I will age you here— the last time we were in the BAU together, you were still sharing a desk with two other agents, and you were all fidgety and nervous most of the time.”

My jaw fell to the floor as a chuckle escaped me. “Aaron Hotchner? Nervous and fidgety?” My chuckle turned into a laugh.

Rossi nodded. “Oh, yeah. He could hardly look me or Shaunessy in the eyes.”

Oh, this was better than anything else. Meeting Hotch’s parents was unrealistic— one because his dad was dead, and two because his mother was a drunk that Hotch didn’t keep in contact with— so talking to David Rossi about Hotch was the closest thing I would get to the “embarrassing stories about Hotch” conversation. I was so excited. However, Hotch didn’t look excited about it, especially since he saw that devious look in my eye that told him I was going to beg and beg for stories.

“You know,” I began addressing Rossi, but mine and Hotch’s gazes were still connected, “you should come over for dinner sometime.” Hotch’s smile fell in an instant when he realized what game I was playing at. “I’d love to hear about what Hotch was like in the early days. You know, before he got old.”

Rossi chuckled again. _This_ was the first impression I wanted. This was how I wanted my dynamic with David Rossi to be. I wanted him to know that I was playful, I was snarky, that I liked pushing Hotch’s buttons; but I also wanted him to know that I took my job seriously, that I was a hard worker, and that I knew what I was doing as a profiler. But now, standing in Hotch’s office, having a relaxed conversation with Rossi, I realized that Hotch was right about how I didn’t need to worry. It would just take Rossi some time to get to know me a little better, but it didn’t hurt that we both liked teaming up against Hotch. Actually, it was a relief to know that there was going to be someone else on the team who could finally rival my back talk. The rest of the team was always too afraid to give Hotch push back, mostly because they respected him, but also because they were scared of him, though they would never admit it. To Rossi, Hotch was still that nervous kiss who had just joined the Bureau and was still seeking to prove himself. It would take a while for that image to escape Rossi. Until then, though, I was content with teaming up with Rossi to get under Hotch’s skin.

“Hotch,” JJ knocked on the open door, “we’ve got a case.”

“Looks like the party’s over,” Rossi told Hotch. “You and I still have some more catching up to do, though. Maybe over that dinner.”

Hotch’s smile reappeared. “Sounds good. Y/N,” he gestured to the door, a sign that I should head to the conference room for our round table meeting.

I took my silent leave, getting the message that he wanted to chat quickly with Rossi alone. When I stepped out of Hotch’s office, Morgan was already bombarding me with questions. He wanted to know about my reinstatement, about my meeting with Strauss, about Rossi, about what was said in Hotch’s office, and about—

“Morgan,” I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, “breathe.” He stopped his rambling of questions long enough for us to continue into the conference room. “Morning, everyone,” I addressed the team. Just like Morgan, though, they were all searching for answers about what had happened over the past week, but more specifically, just now. “Long story short, I’m reinstated, though Strauss tried to give me a whole spiel about it—”

“She better not have,” Morgan rolled his eyes as he set his coffee down in front of him.

“It’s been handled,” I hissed to him under my breath. “Rossi’s fine. He’s just a normal guy. Yes, he’s joining the team, and, no, I don’t know anything else.” I threw my hands up in surrender. “Leave me alone.”

Emily chuckled from her seat across from me. “It’s good to have you back, Greenaway.”

I smiled back at her. “It’s good to be back.”

It really was. I missed messing around with Morgan and seeing Emily’s smile in response. I missed how quiet Reid could be, which made him an easy target for Morgan. I missed how JJ ran around the room to give everyone the case reports while also setting up the TV for the presentation before Hotch could arrive. I missed feeling like a family. While planned vacations were always nice, and Hotch and I never turned down vacation time, being torn away from them without warning was just as unbearable as thinking about losing Jack or Hotch. The team was my family through and through, there was no doubt about it. That week where I couldn’t see them, and there was hardly time to talk to them… It was torture.

As Hotch and Rossi entered the room, closing the door behind them, JJ immediately got started. “Four days ago, Michelle Colucci found this missing person’s poster taped to the front door of her home in Carrollton, Texas.” JJ clicked a button on her remote to show us the poster in question. Sure enough, it was a missing person’s poster of Michelle Colucci, her name, face, and information on it. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

“Wait…” Emily furrowed her brows. “ _She_ found it?”

“Yeah,” JJ chuckled, understanding why there was confusion. She probably had the same reaction when initially reading the case before bringing it to us. “After finding the poster, she took it to the Sheriff, but he figured that it was just a Halloween prank, so he sent her home. A few hours later, he went to go check on her on his way home. That was when he found this…” She pressed another button to show us the crime scene photos. It started with a room where the walls were covered in those missing persons posters of Michelle, then more photos of the house in complete disarray— clear signs that Michelle put up a fight when she was being taken. What came next, though, was most intriguing. On the table in the room where the Unsub hung up all of the posters, he left a white plastic mask with the number one written on it in blood. “A few days later, she was found floating in a creek just outside of the town. She had been sexually assaulted, beaten, drowned, and her face had been removed.”

“Removed?” Rossi inquired. “It wasn’t just an animal or fish that got ahold of her before someone found her?”

JJ shook her head. “The M.E. report stated that the edges were clean and precise, which led them to believe that it was done with a sharp tool.”

“So, the Unsub uses the poster to psychologically mess with her, then actually kidnaps her when she realizes that no one believes her. He takes her, abuses her, defiles the body, and leaves a false face at the crime scene to replace the one he cut off of her. Textbook sadist,” I shrugged.

“A sophisticated one,” Hotch agreed. “We’ll learn more at the scenes. Grab your things. Wheels up in thirty.”

* * *

On the plane, I sat with Emily, Morgan, and Reid around the big table as they all pried for more answers. I had given them the short story, but now they wanted the long one. I told them everything about the call we first got from Strauss to tell us that the unit was being reviewed early, all the way up until I joined them in the conference room that morning for our roundtable discussion. I even told them about how it was Morgan who practically saved my job. Without him, I was sure that Strauss would have won because she was on the committee that was reviewing my conduct. I remembered to thank him about another hundred times while on that flight alone, and told him that after this case, I’d take him for drinks. Emily laughed and asked if she could come along. I said the more the merrier, even asking Reid and JJ if they wanted to come.

As for Hotch and Rossi, they sat together in the back of the plane, talking quietly about _something_ , which I clearly recognized as them gossiping about me. Seriously, they were worse than a pair of high school girls. The quick side glances, the covering of their mouths as they said something secret every so often, the smile that would flash across Hotch’s face whenever Rossi would joke about something. Like, could they be any more obvious about it? Hell, they could have written on their foreheads: “TALKING ABOUT Y/N”, and they still would have thought that they were getting away with it. I knew that they hadn’t seen each other in years, and what was going on with me and Hotch was still considerably fresh. Rossi likely had a million and one questions, and Hotch was probably all too excited to tell him everything.

As I watched them every so often, I couldn’t help but imagine how Hotch used to be _quiet._ From what I knew about his past, Hotch was somewhat of a bad kid when he was younger. He was probably just acting out because of his abusive father and absent mother, but still. I imagined that Hotch grew up with the white t-shirts under bomber jackets or black leather jackets. I imagined him hiding behind his school, smoking a cigarette or a joint. I imagined him being the life of the party because he was seeking attention outside of the home he was trying to escape. In other words, I imagined young Hotch as how Sean, his brother, acted now. I never, not in a million years, would have guessed that after that crazy, loud childhood that he would become quiet, fidgety, and shy. Maybe it was for Haley. I mean, he did turn his life around for her. Maybe he had just intended on keeping his head down so that he could do his job and get back to his wife. But Aaron Hotchner as anything but stern, demanding, _scary_ , and dominant… it just felt wrong. It felt like a lie. But, boy, oh, boy, was I excited to hear more about it. I had been trying to find new ways to push Hotch’s buttons, to embarrass him and get the upper hand from time to time. These stories that Rossi had hidden away in his memory would be the perfect ammunition that I had been searching tirelessly for.

“Alright,” Hotch finally spoke up, standing from his seat on the other side of the plane, “let’s start.” He took a seat on the arm of the couch that was closest to the rest of us. JJ and Rossi sat on the cushions. “Reid, what do we know about the victim?”

Reid opened up his case file and started reading the entire file, collecting all of the information Hotch required in under ten seconds. “Michelle Colucci was single, lived alone, no immediate family members, no toxic past relationships.”

“At least, not in the reports,” I said.

Reid eyed me with a forced frown that tried to mask how relieved he was that someone was finally back to push him and his knowledge around. He continued before he could crack a smile. “Friends and co-workers say she was a classic workaholic at her architecture firm. Since there doesn’t seem to be any immediate connections, it’s possible that she was stalked.”

“Interesting…” Rossi hummed to himself, writing something down in his mini notebook. Everyone’s attention turned to see if he had anything to say. He noticed the silence and looked up to see that we were all waiting on him. “Oh. Sorry. I was just thinking aloud.”

“Something to add?” Hotch inquired.

“No,” Rossi shook his head. “Continue.”

“So, she was pretty, smart, and rich. All the classic draws for a stalker,” Morgan said, moving on before the silence could linger in the air. “He could have been acting out some kind of fantasy with her— you know, the perfect woman from his dreams, or something.”

“Maybe it was out of anger?” I offered up.

Considering that he had toyed with her before taking her, it insinuated that he wanted her to go mad, to fall apart, to suffer. By doing it around Halloween, he managed to convince the law enforcement and her friends that it was nothing more than a prank, which isolated her. She was alone and terrified, and, yeah, he could have gotten off on that, but he would have only done this in the first place if he was mad at her. Therefore he had to know her or enough about her to make a judgement.

“I don’t think so,” Reid challenged. “The mask the Unsub left in her house,” he held up the crime scene photo, “it’s blank. Usually masks represent either the best or worst sides of ourselves. This is just…”

“Faceless?” I played along.

Reid smiled and nodded. “Exactly. It doesn’t say that he’s angry.”

“But he wrote the number one on it with blood,” JJ said.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s angry, though. It just points more evidence towards him being a sadist.”

“So we’re right back where we started,” Hotch shrugged.

“At least until we can get a look at the crime scene,” Reid half-agreed.

Hotch’s phone started to ring. He rolled his eyes slightly as he dug it out of his pocket and answered mid-meeting. “Hotchner.” He waited a beat for the other end of the call to make their point. “Thanks for letting us know.” Silence. “We’ll be landing here in a bit, so we’ll head straight there. Thanks.” Hotch hung up the call and hid his phone away again. “That was the Sheriff. There’s been another kidnapping in Dallas. Keep looking, see if you guys can notice something else before we land. Y/N and I will go to the new victim’s home to talk with her roommate. Morgan and Emily, head to Ms. Colucci’s house. Rossi and Reid, go to the disposal site to figure out what you can about this guy’s M.O. JJ, head down to the station and talk to the Sheriff to try and contain this. We only want the media to know what we give them.”

So as we landed, everyone teamed up with their pair and got into the cars that were waiting for us just outside. Hotch and I were the first to leave, Reid and Rossi behind us with JJ, and Emily and Morgan behind them. On our way to the newest victim’s house, we had Garcia send over information about her. Her name was Enid White. She was an unemployed Hispanic female, living with an old college friend to help pay for her house. Like our other victim, Ms. Colucci, Enid was single with no signs of any past strained relationships. She seemed to keep her head down, working at the tech company she was employed at until about a month ago when she quit. Nothing was out of the ordinary. So why choose her? Why Michelle Colucci and Enid White? What was their connection? I mean, there _had_ to be one, right?

As we pulled up to the house, I flipped the case file closed and tucked it between the seat I was in and the arm rest. Hotch put the car in park against the curb, then we took a moment to look around the neighborhood we were in. The media was already crawling around everywhere, the police department trying to hold them back.

“I’ll talk with the detective on the case,” Hotch said, opening his door. As we both got out and could look at each other over the roof of the car, he continued, “Go inside to talk to the roommate.” I nodded. “We need to get to the station as fast as possible.”

The first twenty-four hours were always the most important, I knew it just as well as the next person. Our latest victim, Enid White, had been gone for ten hours at least, already. If we were going to find her alive, we had to race against the clock. Whatever time we thought we had to build a profile and find the Unsub, was now gone entirely. This was going to have to be a rushed job, which meant a loose profile that would hardly help us.

Enid’s roommate was sitting in their living room, a warm cup of tea between her hands, her knee bouncing anxiously against the carpet. As I entered, she stopped shaking for a moment long enough to look up at me and gauge that I was another official there to question her. She sighed as she hugged her knees up to her chest, propping her feet on the couch. While introducing myself, she gestured for me to take a seat across from her that had been used all day by different cops trying to hear her story. I apologized for having to do this, yet still insisted that it was a necessity if we were going to find Enid on time.

“Enid walks her dog, Charlie, every night just before sundown. She liked that it’s cooled off by then and she can watch the sunset as she walks. She always comes home before it gets dark because she knows what could happen if she…” She hesitated a moment as she realized what she was about to admit. Enid was terrified of becoming a victim. She played it safe, walking her dog when it was safe and still convenient. She was a cautious girl, but she just happened to be too predictable with her constant schedule. “When she didn’t come back home by seven, I knew that something was wrong. I went outside to see if she was just playing with Charlie in the yard, or something. That was when I found all of the posters taped to our house that said she was missing. I’ve been watching the news, and I had heard about that lady who found the same thing at her house, so I called the cops and just waited.” She took a sip of her tea.

“Where’s Charlie now?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“Well…” I pushed myself to my feet. “Thank you for speaking with me. I know that having to repeat it a thousand times isn’t fun.”

“You’re done already?”

I nodded. “We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”

She nodded from her seat, too, and took another sip of her tea to hide her emotions.

I left the house quietly, finding that Hotch was finishing up his conversation with the lead detective. Hotch saw me approaching and excused himself from their conversation, shaking the detective’s hand, then walking over to meet me halfway. “Enid’s roommate says that Enid took the same path every day to walk her dog. Same time, same path… Perfect schedule for a stalker to follow. She said that she saw the posters when she stepped out to check on Enid. I’m assuming Enid probably saw it, too. Do you know if anyone saw the Unsub putting them up?”

Hotch shook his head. “The detective said that a few neighbors _might_ have seen something, but they’re all unsure, and they couldn’t describe the man. He also said that he had no idea that there was a mask left at Ms. Colucci’s house.”

I cocked a brow. “Why wouldn’t he leave another mask?”

“If he didn’t take her, he couldn’t complete his ritual. He probably put up the posters to spook her, but she got smart and ran before he could grab her. He must have run away or after her— either way, she managed to escape him, which is why he didn’t come back to leave a mask. He’ll do it when he actually takes her.”

“So you think she’s out there on her own?”

“It would explain why the dog is gone, too. Call Garcia, have her check Enid’s credit card history. If she’s on the run, she would have needed to buy food, gas, a hotel room, something.”

We started walking back to the car as I dialed Garcia’s number to ask for what Hotch needed. “Speak,” was all she quipped.

“Garcia, can you check Enid White’s financial information for us?” I asked, opening my car door.

“Por que?”

“We need to know if she has purchased anything since her disappearance last night.”

“Jackpot! You, Agent Greenaway, get the kudos card today. It looks like Enid bought a shotgun at a weapons store just outside of Dallas this morning.”

I raised a brow and looked at Hotch before putting the call on speaker. “Are you sure that it was Enid who bought it and not someone using her credit card?”

“I can check the store’s security tapes. Un momento, por favor.” Garcia was silent as she looked through the security footage of the store since they’re required to have one for safety purposes and for tracking purposes in case of situations like this. “It looks like Enid, that’s for sure.”

“Thanks, Garcia,” Hotch answered for me.

“No problemo. I’ll be around.” She hung up.

I wasn’t sure where this newfound fascination with dropping Spanish into her sentences randomly came from, but then again, it was Garcia. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But what she told us was actually helpful to the case. We knew that Enid was at least not taken by the Unsub, as originally suspected, which meant that we could likely make contact with her soon. If Enid was out there on her own, then the Unsub was likely getting antsy to find her or find someone else to complete his ritual. He was going to spiral soon unless he found a victim to psychologically torture then brutally murder.

* * *

Back at the station, Morgan, Emily, JJ, and Reid were already working on finishing up more of the profile. Rossi was sitting in a chair off to the side, scribbling notes into his little notebook that he had been obsessed with since the beginning of the case. I noticed how Hotch kept eyeing Rossi out of the corner of his eye, maybe trying to profile something about him; but since I didn’t know Rossi well enough yet, I couldn’t tell what it was Hotch was looking for.

While Hotch was busy over thinking something, I told the team that Enid had bought a gun, which meant that she was likely on the run from the Unsub. So not only were we looking for our Unsub, but now we were also racing to get to Enid before he could get to her.

Spencer brought up what they found at the dump site. Him and Rossi were told by the officers on the scene that Ms. Colucci’s body was found face down in the water, her ankles tied to a rock that should have weighed her down to the bottom of the river. By weighing his victim down, it told us that the Unsub didn’t want her to be found, which meant that he was somehow connected to her—meaning that through Ms. Colucci’s history, we would be able to find him. We knew that her family was limited, and relationships were scarce. Now it was just a question of which friend or acquaintance did this to her.

Emily and Morgan, who had only just returned from scouting out Ms. Colucci’s home, notes that the Unsub had been hiding in her garden while stalking her. The garden was protected by tall plants and two trees, which meant that there was plenty of cover to hide from Ms. Colucci and any neighbors who were around— which also explained why no one was able to say if they had seen the Unsub putting the posters up or not.

“Sheriff,” a deputy approached, “there’s a call for you on line one.”

The sheriff spun around in his chair and stretched over his desk to answer the phone on speaker. “Hello?”

“My name is Enid White,” the woman said nervously over the phone. “The news said that the police didn’t believe that other girl when she told them about the posters; and now she’s dead. I saw the same posters on my house, so I ran… but I don’t think I can keep going much longer. I have a gun to protect myself, but I think he’s going to find me soon.”

“Enid, this is Agent Greenaway with the FBI,” I said, stepping forward. “Can you tell us where you are?”

She hesitated for a moment, likely debating about whether or not she could trust me. I didn’t blame her, in her shoes, I’d be just as paranoid. That being said, however, if we were going to help her, she needed to be in our protection at the precinct. If we were going to find her before the Unsub, she just had to tell us where she was, and we’d do everything in our power to protect her.

“The El Royale Motel in Dallas,” she finally admitted. “Room six.”

The team immediately started racing around to gear up while on their way to the cars. I stayed for a moment to finish talking with her. “Enid, I need you to listen to me carefully. Keep the blinds closed, put something over the peep hole, lock the door, put a chair in front of it— if you can— and don’t open the door for anyone but me. I’ll knock three times and you’ll hear my voice, alright?”

“Okay,” she agreed nervously.

“You’re going to be alright, Enid. We’re on our way.”

The sheriff hung up the call following my gesture. We were the last two to run out of the precinct, the team already gone in the FBI’s signature black SUVs that we had driven around from the airport. The sheriff led me to his squad car, and we started racing towards Dallas. It was about a twenty minute drive of knowing that we could do nothing but cross our fingers that Enid would still be alright by the time we could arrive at the motel. Despite the sirens and the lights, people on the road seemed to struggle with remembering to move out of our way, leaving the sheriff to try his best to maneuver in and out of traffic as carefully as he could while still going far over the speed limit.

When we arrived at the hotel, the team was already prepping to move in towards room six, but I was the only one Enid knew to open the door for, therefore they had to wait for my call. Hotch gave me a short nod as I got out of the squad car and started pushing past all the vehicles. I pulled out my weapon, making sure to keep it lowered at my side, and carefully approached the door to room six. Just as I had promised to Enid over the phone, I knocked three times on the door and called out her name to let her know that it was me. I half expected to immediately hear the sound of her shuffling around inside, desperate to run to the door to make sure that it really was me and that we were really there to help. But there was nothing. There was no sign of movement inside, no sign that someone was going to come answer the door. No one even said anything. I figured that if she wasn’t going to hurry to the door, she could at least ask me a few questions to ensure that it was me. Still nothing, though.

I glanced over my shoulder, a signal to the team that something was wrong. Hotch held up his hand, pointing his index finger towards the sky, then moved it in a circular motion to gesture for the team to move in carefully. I took a step back from the door, squaring up my shoulders, getting a proper stance to ready myself for what would come next.

“Enid White! FBI! Open up!” I shouted one more time, just to see if she would come to the door now.

When there was still no sign, I nodded to Emily, who was standing just beside the door frame. She acknowledged my signal and reached out for the door handle to see if it would budge. To our surprise, it did. The door opened with ease, concerning everyone around since I had specifically instructed Enid to practically barricade herself inside.

Emily and I exchanged another glance before we nodded simultaneously towards each other. She rushed around the corner and into the motel room, her weapon raised. As she ran further into the room to clear the bathroom area, I pushed into the room, too, to look around for Enid. There wasn’t really anywhere she could hide, to be honest. All there was, was a bed, a table, and a dresser with a TV on it. The door that had belonged to the table, was smashed to bits on the carpet, just in front of where the door swung open. On the bed, there were hundreds of those missing person’s posters with Enid’s face on them, and a white mask in the middle that had the number “two” written on its forehead with blood. I sighed to myself as I holstered my weapon and called for the team to come in. Emily returned from the bathroom to say that there was nothing in there. No sign of Enid, her belongings, or a struggle.

“The shotgun she bought?” I asked after taking notice that it wasn’t in the bedroom. Emily shook her head. “We’re too late. If she’s not dead yet, she will be soon. He’s still in a rush to finish his ritual.”

“He knew we were coming,” Hotch said, stepped into the room with the rest of the team.

“Take a look at this,” Emily commented after kneeling down on the floor to look at something under the bed. As she stood, I noticed that she was holding a cellphone in her hand— using a cloth from her back pocket to grab it without using gloves. “If she used a cellphone to call the station, then—”

“He was probably right outside, listening with an interceptor, waiting for the right moment to strike,” Morgan finished.

The sheriff raised a brow. “Why stake this place out? Why not just grab her immediately?”

“Because he wanted us to find the mask first,” I answered. “’Scuse me,” I apologized, pushing past him and Morgan to get to the door. I hurried out of the room and took a step onto the sidewalk to take in a deep breath.

I had been the one who told Enid to stay there, that we were coming for her and that she would be safe. I promised that it would be me at the door, and no one else. Why would she have let the door open? I mean, she clearly didn’t want to at first, telling by the broken chair on the ground, but still. And calling from her cellphone when there was a landline right there… The best thing— the _only_ thing we could do for Enid now was to finish the profile and race to find her again.

Based on all of the information we had collected over the past couple of hours, what did we know about the Unsub? Well, for one, he was “flashy”. He wanted people to know what he was doing, but he was careful with who knew what— for instance, how he clearly only wanted the police to know about the masks, but he was fine with the media knowing about the posters. He clearly wanted to be recognized by the people who mattered most. At first, that was his victims. When they ignored him, he got rid of them. Now that the cops were paying attention, he wanted to keep it going. Once the media started recognizing him, too, he started getting them involved with the investigation. He clearly cared more about his people’s opinions of him rather than the women he was harassing, because he took the time to try and hide their bodies in the water in order to protect himself. This was probably because he was just an ordinary person. He looked average, he sounded average, his home was average, his job was average—

Then something hit me.

There weren’t many people who knew what a cellphone interceptor was, and even fewer knew how to use one. If the Unsub knew that he was going to wait for her to make a call, he knew how to use it, which meant that he was technologically savvy— which meant that he could have had a job working with technology. So, he was smart, creative, confident… and he was very clearly angry.

There was our profile. That was everything we needed. I had practically built the entire psychological piece, Morgan and Emily could probably give a physical description based on what they found at Michelle Colucci’s house. We were good to go.

* * *

The news was playing quietly in the background as the entire precinct gathered around to hear our presentation of the profile. JJ made sure that the TV stayed on all day so that they could monitor the news’ information to make sure that there were no leaks. We wanted to keep our profile and the mask under wraps, and once I told the team about my profile of the Unsub being an attention seeker, it was of the utmost importance that the news just stopped reporting about him until we could catch him.

Everyone in the precinct seemed focused on us and our presentation, though. It wasn’t going to take long, especially since it was a fairly quick and easy profile; but the fact of the matter was that we were rushing again to find Enid. Just like when we originally thought that the Unsub had her, the clock was ticking once more. Emily and Morgan, as expected, gave the physical description. Based on the evidence found at Michelle Colucci’s house, they guessed that he was a middle aged, white, 5 foot 5, 180 pound male. Average, like I said. I added that we should be looking at employees at tech companies in the area. As I was explaining why, however, everyone’s attention seemed to turn to the news. I came to a stop as I saw the headline change to the one thing we didn’t want.

“JJ,” Hotch began, catching her attention out the corner of her eye, “how did the news get that?”

JJ shook her head. “I have no idea. I made sure that everyone knew that we were keeping that close—”

“I did it,” Rossi admitted while stepping out of the break room. I hadn’t even realized that he wasn’t up front giving the profile with us. “I called them.”

“What?” Hotch asked, utterly confused.

“I said that the FBI thinks that the masks mean that he’s incompetent.”

Hotch eyes narrowed as he tried to keep his professional cool. When he realized that everyone was looking to him and not Rossi for answers, he started walking towards the break room. “We need to talk.”

Rossi’s decision to put the mask into the news sped up our timeline twofold. Before, we probably had until sundown when he could use nighttime as cover to murder Enid White, but now, he was probably going to kill her within the next few hours because Rossi just challenged his intelligence. We knew that the Unsub was a sophisticated, narcissistic man. Rossi’s comment about him being impotent was going to force his hand, because now he felt like he had something to prove to us.

Because of this, the rest of us jumped into action to prepare for a call from the Unsub or for a new crime scene we’d be called to within the next few hours. We had to try to narrow down our search. We had an idea of his occupation—and while it wasn’t much, we could at least use that to figure out where in the area he could possibly be. Reid raced to the map on the wall in the board room, Morgan and Emily started looking through files, and I called Garcia to get a trap and trace ready.

Taking into account where the two victims were taken, where Ms. Colucci was found, and where the nearby top tech companies were located, we could narrow down the area of where we should be looking. Garcia was on call while searching employee records of all of the different companies we wanted her to take a look at.

“Holy moly—” Garcia whispered under her breath. The room went quiet for a moment before I asked her about what she found. “I think I just found the connection between our victims. Enid White worked at a tech company called Techno Communications up until two months ago, and Michelle Colucci helped with the recent architecture of the new floors going into the building right now.”

“How did we miss that before?” I asked.

“Because Michelle Colucci’s work was supposed to be off-book until she was done and could get paid.”

“Our Unsub probably ran into both victims at Techno Communications,” Morgan stated the obvious.

And then the phone started ringing. Garcia must have heard it through the call we already had running, because she told us she was ready whenever we were. JJ got up from her seat and ran to go find Hotch and Rossi. A few seconds later, they returned, and Rossi answered the call before we could.

“This is FBI’s Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi. With whom am I speaking?”

“You called me incompetent _and_ impotent,” the Unsub hissed through gritted teeth. Rossi stayed quiet. “I’m not _impotent_ ,” he whispered even quieter. Silence hung in the air again, and I could hear a phone ringing in the background.

“And what about incompetent?”

“I’m not _incompetent_ , either.”

“Are you sure about that?” Rossi was trying to push the Unsub’s buttons, to play his game, to make him snap and maybe trip up on his tongue.

And then I heard another phone ringing.

I scrambled to grab a piece of paper from the notebook in front of Emily. She watched as I tore a page in half, then stole her pen right from her hands. As I scribbled something down posthaste, the whole team tried to look over to see what I was doing. Rossi kept talking, kept trying to get under the Unsub’s skin, buying me time to finish writing my message. When I finally had it all down, despite the shitty handwriting, I held it up for both Rossi and Hotch to see. After reading it and taking note of my point, I slumped back in my chair, my energy suddenly gone. Morgan grabbed the piece of paper to get a look at what I wanted to tell them.

In the background of the call, there was the endless sound of multiple phones ringing. The Unsub was whispering because he was at work, probably on a floor of cubicles, and he was trying to go undetected. We knew that there was a connection between the two victims, and that was their former workplace. He was still there. We could go get him, as long as we were sure that he was there and not somewhere else.

“Why are you whispering? Are you at work?”

“You have to tell the news the truth,” the Unsub dodged Rossi’s question. It didn’t matter if he answered, though. Garcia was tracing the call and we already had a hunch. Either way, we were going to get him.

“I’m not going to tell them anything. If you turn yourself in, you can tell them yourself.”

“No!” he raised his voice quickly. Silence hung in the air for a beat, probably because he realized that he had lashed out when he wasn’t supposed to. “ _No_ …” he whispered again. “ _You_ have to do it.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s just not going to happen. But I’ll tell you what _will_ happen.” Rossi took a seat and leaned over the table so that he was closer to the speaker. “I’m going to check the precinct’s security tapes from the day Michelle Colucci came in to report that someone had hung those posters up at her house. I know that you had been watching her long enough—stalking her for long enough— that you would know how to follow her around while going undetected. Despite that, however, I’m sure that when I look at those tapes, I’m going to see you hovering around her. I’m going to take that tape, I’m going to take your face from it, and I’m going to plaster it all around the city— just like you did with those women to inspire fear. Only this time, people won’t notice you because of fear. Hell, they won’t even _admire_ you, like you want. No. They’re going to _hate_ you, because you’re a disgusting, vile nobody. No one will _fear_ you. They will _loathe_ you. You’re just a loser. A nobody. An infamous celebrity wannabe. We’ll catch you, you’ll be on the news for a day or so, and then you’ll just be forgotten like you always have. Why? Because you’re not special—” Hotch stood from his seat to try and stop Rossi, but it didn’t help. “–You’re ordinary. You’re going to disappear forever. No one will remember you or your name. This was all for nothing.”

Everyone stared at Rossi. We were all shell shocked by what had just happened. Even if we wanted to say something, what would we have done? Rossi had just gone ahead and insulted every bit of the profile I built for this Unsub. He had just poked and prodded every button that this guy had. And we had no fucking clue how the Unsub was going to respond.

The silence was absolutely deafening. Hotch was glaring at Rossi again, another warning that he was on thin ice. I knew that they were friends, and Rossi was a great agent, but this… He had gone too far with disobeying Hotch’s orders and now throwing out our entire profile. Honestly, he probably just got Enid killed. Even if the Unsub was at his office still, he probably wouldn’t be by the time we could get there to arrest him. He’d be gone and we’d get a call soon saying that Enid’s body had been found tied to a rock at the bottom of a lake again.

“You just signed Enid White’s death warrant.”

As Rossi sat back in his chair to come to terms with what the Unsub just said, the call ended. I didn’t hesitate to pick up my phone and ask Garcia if she traced the call. Just as we suspected, he had called from Techno Communications. Hotch, still staring down Rossi, told Garcia to get in contact with Techno Communications to close down the building while we would rush over there.

Garcia hung up the call with us so that she could get in contact with the company. The rest of us hurried to gear up and get back in the cars so that we could race there before the Unsub could get away.

As we pushed through the front doors of the building, racing into the full lobby, Hotch dug out his cellphone. “Garcia, which floors of the building was Ms. Colucci renovating?” He waited for her answer. “Thanks.” Hotch hung up without any more questions or so much as a goodbye. We all stopped to huddle around him to hear what he wanted us to do since we had the whole building and all of the employees to search. There had to be a way to narrow it down, and it probably had to do with the call he just made. “Morgan, take floor six; Y/N, seven; Emily, eight; Reid, nine. We’re looking for someone who just works a regular desk job. He likely made a scene about twenty minutes ago. He could still be hanging around, or he could have left in a hurry. Just… look around, but don’t approach him, if you happen to see him. Go.”

The four of us scurried off towards the hallway of elevators just ahead and to the right. When we approached the sixth floor, Morgan quietly got off, then when we reached the seventh floor, I stepped out. The floor itself seemed entirely empty and quiet. There were a few private offices that had been renovated already and seemed occupied, but the maze of cubicles wasn’t done yet. We weren’t looking for a guy who would work in one of those fancy, private offices. He would have been in the middle of all of the other cubicles, blending in with all of the other average people. If we were going to find him, or at least his things, it wasn’t going to be on that floor. I mean, even if he wanted to hide behind all of the construction and industrial sized plastic hanging from the ceiling, I would have seen him the moment I stepped out of the elevator. He wasn’t there. There wasn’t any point in wasting my time searching there when I could return downstairs to help look there or to start questioning the other employees.

So I returned to the elevator just as quickly as I had gotten out. It seemed like I needed to wait for Spencer to get off on the ninth floor first, because the floor counter just above the frame seemed frozen on NINE for a minute before slowly making its descent towards me again. As it opened, I noticed that neither Emily nor Reid were inside still. That was good. At least they found something of more interest for them to stick around on their floors longer. I only went one floor, though, before the elevator slowed down and dinged to let me know that someone was going to be joining me. Morgan probably had shit luck, too.

“Find anything?” Morgan asked as he stepped into the elevator with me. I shook my head and asked if he happened to have better luck. “Nope. Nothing.”

We started slowly descending back towards the lobby to give Hotch the bad news. Our Unsub was probably long gone. Hopefully, Emily or Reid found something on their floors, otherwise we were going to have to search every single desk in the building and interrogate every employee—and that was a lot of unnecessary hassle.

As the elevator doors dinged before slowly sliding open, Morgan asked how Hotch and I were doing. I laughed at him and told him he’d never know the truth. He smiled at me playfully and took the first step out. I was close on his heels.

“Down!” Hotch shouted in the hallway.

I stopped in my tracks. Morgan immediately heard the order and dove towards the floor. He rolled out of the way, grabbing his pistol on his hip as he did so. Gunfire echoed through the hallway as Hotch shot the man standing in front of the elevator. As he landed on his back, Morgan aimed his weapon up at the Unsub, but he was too late. The Unsub fell to the ground, his weapon dropping out of his grip.

Before the elevator doors could reclose on me, I cautiously stepped into the hallway with my weapon still in hand. Rossi and Hotch were standing to my left, having followed the Unsub from the lobby, and Morgan was on the floor just in front of me. I squatted and used two fingers against the Unsub’s pulse to see if he was still alive or not. When I felt no throbbing in his neck to signal that his blood was still pumping and his heart was beating, I looked up at Hotch and shook my head. Both him and Rossi holstered their weapons.

I stood, walked a few steps, then I leaned over slightly, my arm outstretched, my palm hanging flat. Morgan looked up at me then my hand before taking the silent offer he was given. As his hand clapped against mine and grabbed on, I pulled him up to his feet. Morgan groaned as his bicep flexed while he lifted himself up, too. When he was planted upright on his feet, our hands parted so that he could wipe the dirt off of his pants, and he thanked me.

“The only person allowed to shoot you is me, alright?” I teased, patting his shoulder.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You two okay?” Hotch asked.

We both nodded.

“What about Enid White?” the sheriff asked from behind Rossi.

Hotch turned around. “Well, we have his address now. We’ll probably find her there.”

Woah— When the hell did we get an address? Had Emily and Reid already come downstairs or did Garcia somehow utilize her utter genius to beat us to the punch? What did I miss?

“I’ll send my guys there now, then,” the sheriff told us before stepping away to call his deputies.

“You sure you’re okay?” Hotch asked me, carefully approaching.

I nodded and shrugged, unsure of why he was asking me when Morgan was the one nearly caught in the crossfire. I had been hiding in the elevator the whole time. I was okay. And Enid White was probably going to be okay, too. Considering the time of day she was taken, the Unsub probably left during his lunch break to grab her— or maybe called in to say that he had a doctor’s appointment in the morning. Either way, he didn’t have enough time to torture and kill Enid like he wanted to. She was probably at his house, just as we were suspecting. It was going to be okay.

* * *

When I had my things collected and said goodnight to the team as they started making their way out of the BAU, I walked up to Hotch’s office. He was sitting at his desk, looking over some paperwork, maybe from the case we just got back from, or maybe something else. Either way, he looked exhausted, and I think we both just needed to go home and rest. Even when I knocked on the door to try and catch his attention, he seemed so out of it that he didn’t really notice. So, I took the initiative to step in and take a seat across from him.

As I sighed while getting comfortable in my seat, Hotch finally looked up and seemed utterly shocked and confused about how I was suddenly sitting in his office without him taking notice originally. I smirked and crossed my legs, leaning back comfortably. He realized what this was all about and started closing his files so that he could sort them out on his desk for the night. I played with the hem of my shirt as I waited, pulling down the collar slightly to seem more… relaxed and comfortable… but I caught Hotch clearing his throat and trying not to stare. I smirked and bit my lip seductively.

“Stop that…” he mumbled.

I shrugged but continued to stare at him while holding my lip captive. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door, catching mine and Hotch’s attention. Hotch looked up from packing up his things and I turned away from staring at him, releasing my bottom lip before anyone could notice. When we noticed that it was just Rossi and not Strauss or something, we both relaxed and smiled at him.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he apologized, stepping further into the office. “I figured that, if the offer is still available, I’d take you guys up on that dinner.”

I nodded. “We’d love that.”

Hotch swung his bag over his shoulder. “Hope you don’t mind boxed spaghetti and grocery store marinara sauce.” He was teasing, of course. He must have known that Rossi took his Italian side _very_ seriously and decided to push that button— probably just like old times.

Rossi’s eyes widened before letting out a chuckle. “Oh, hell no. I’ll make it homemade myself if it means we get to have the good stuff.”

I stood as Hotch came around his desk and reached out for my hand. Rossi headed out of the office first. He kept glancing over his shoulder to make sure that we were following. As we stepped onto the ramp, we could see Strauss leaving her office in the hallway just outside the BAU. I immediately tore my hand away from Hotch’s and took a few quick steps to walk next to Rossi. After Strauss locked her office door, she turned to see the three of us meeting her at the elevator and shared a polite smile with us. It seemed like all three of us were less than inclined to smile back, but we did so anyways.

“How did the case in Texas go?” she asked us as we pushed through the glass doors and she pressed the elevator button.

“Fine,” Hotch answered, standing just behind me. I could practically feel how he was towering over me… “Quick and easy.” I gulped. The elevator opened and Hotch reached around me so that he could hold the door open. “Ladies first,” he smiled at Strauss.

She silently thanked him and stepped inside. “And you, Agent Greenaway. How was your first day back in the field?”

My eyes searched for Hotch’s as we all squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the elevator. He nodded for me to respond. “It went well,” I responded quietly. “Glad to be back.”

Before we knew it, the elevator slowed to a stop and we all piled out. Strauss wished us all a goodnight before hurrying out on her own. Rossi turned on his heels to look at us and raise his brows as if to say: “Wow.”

“The tension nearly suffocated me in there,” he chuckled. “What the hell happened?” Hotch and I shared a glance. “Ah,” he sighed, “I see.” We both nodded. “Well, my place or yours?”

Honestly, I was glad that _someone_ wasn’t making a big deal of it finally. When the team first found out about me and Hotch, there were a million and one questions—especially from Elle and Morgan. When Strauss found out, she tried to pry us apart. I thought that with Rossi’s same reservations as Gideon’s, he wouldn’t like mine and Hotch’s relationship… but he actually seemed… okay with it. A relief, to be sure. Earlier, when we met, he seemed excited that Hotch was happy and had me to watch his back in the field. I was scared that when he figured out that our relationship had become a problem at the workplace, he would disapprove. But he didn’t seem to mind, and it was like he was holding back all of his questions for when we’d sit down for dinner and start polite conversation about our lives and catching up with him. I liked that. I liked that he respected that boundary we created for ourselves. I couldn’t say the same about Morgan and Emily, who always seemed to ask about it.

“We offered, so, why don’t you come to ours?” I asked.

“Sounds good to me,” Rossi agreed.

Hotch finally took my hand again, knowing that the coast was clear. “Do you remember the way, old man?”

Rossi chuckled to himself. “One of these days, I’ll get you back for that.”

“Ooh,” I smiled, “I’m sure there’s plenty of embarrassing stories, right?” Rossi nodded. “I think we could start there.”

Rossi pointed his finger at me. “I like her—” He paused and looked at Hotch. “I like… _them_ ,” he corrected carefully. “I like them,” he said with more confidence.

Hotch smiled. “Good job,” he whispered.

After Rossi cheered to himself for getting it right, the three of us headed out to the parking lot. We split up to go left and right towards our respective cars. When we got into the car, Hotch started the engine, and I grabbed his hand from the steering wheel. I brought his knuckles up to my lips and pressed a gentle kiss against them. Hotch carefully pulled his hand away so that he could press it to my cheek.

“You did good today,” he complimented quietly. I nodded against his touch. “I love you.”

I smiled and kissed his palm. “I love you, too.” His hand fell from my face and gripped the steering wheel again. “But I’m going to be taking notes on all of Rossi’s stories.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You already had a rough time walking this morning. Don’t make it worse for yourself tomorrow morning.”

Fair enough, Agent Hotchner. Fair enough.


	23. ANYONE BUT GARCIA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of smut. Mentions of Dom/sub relationship. Talk of murder, kidnapping, shooting-- literally everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 3 Episode 09. A month after part twenty-two.

When we got back from the case we had just finished, Hotch and I decided to stop at a diner for dinner. I wasn’t necessarily hungry—especially after that case—but Hotch put the option out there, which meant that he was probably hungry, so I accepted for his sake. I could afford to snack on something, I supposed. But, really, how was I supposed to eat anything after that confession? I mean, Morgan practically ran out of the interrogation room to go throw up in the bathroom. None of us expected what Floyd Feylinn was going to admit to. We thought that, if anything, he was going to tell us that he ate Tracy Lambert, and we were going to call it a day. I don’t think any of us stopped to consider that everyone at the search party two days prior had unknowingly consumed Tracy’s remains in the chili he made. Our team hadn’t taken the offer of anyone’s home cooked meal because we were too busy trying to organize the search and build the profile. It was a good thing that we hadn’t. Despite not actually eating anything, though, I could tell that none of us were too keen on the idea of eating— which was why I was so shocked when Hotch offered. Maybe a milkshake or something wouldn’t hurt. I mean, it was cold that time of year, but a milkshake never killed anyone… Geez. Even thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.

At the diner, there were only a few other couples occupying some of the booths, but since it was so late, most of the dinner rush was gone. Hotch and I could pick anywhere to sit, so he took my hand, and he led me over to a booth away from the window, somewhat towards the back of the dining area. He let go of my hand when we arrived at the seat he wanted. We both sat down simultaneously, scooching into the middle of the booths until we were comfortable. Hotch picked up his menu and started skimming. I picked up my menu, but I hid my face behind it so that he couldn’t see how disinterested I was.

Nothing looked good. Nothing sounded good. All I could think about was that chili and the way he laughed when he told us the truth. He didn’t care that he did that to all those people. He didn’t care that he did that to Tracey Lambert. He was a monster. The worst of the worst. And his wicked laugh was still ringing in my ears. I almost wished that Morgan and Hotch would’ve let the preacher strangle Feylinn then and there. He deserved it, didn’t he?

I put my menu down and sighed quietly, just thinking about how I was ready to go home. I was fine with not eating. I wanted to just lay down in his arms. I wanted to feel how his chest moved slowly against my back every time he breathed, and I wanted to feel how his strong, long arms would hold me tight, and how his breath would be hot on my ear, and how he would take random moments to kiss me. I needed simple. I needed him. I needed home.

Hotch finally looked up at me, reading my face. No. Profiling all of me. I looked up at him and did the same. Neither of us seemed happy or hungry. I originally thought that he wanted dinner, which was why he offered it; but I started realizing that he probably thought that I wanted dinner. It was clear that neither of us wanted to be there. What was the point of staying and spending money on a meal that we weren’t going to eat?

“Do you want to get out of here?” he finally asked me. I nodded immediately. He dug into his pocket, fishing out a ten dollar bill as an apology tip for ditching the waitress, then he reached across the table to take my hand. We both stood simultaneously, and he started pulling me towards the door. When we got settled in the car, Hotch leaned over the armrest between us, grabbed my chin between his fingers, making me look at him, and said, “You know what sounds nice?” I shook my head slightly while still being held by him. “Hot chocolate, blankets, and a movie.”

I hummed an agreement before leaning in to kiss him. After he pecked my lips a few times, he settled in his seat to face forward while starting the car. It wasn’t a long drive home from where we were, but Hotch seemed insistent on holding my hand in his lap while his thumb drew circled around my knuckles. His touch was so relaxing to the point I nearly fell asleep in the car, actually. I had been staring out the window, looking up at the sky and the stars that were above, and we were listening to quiet music over the radio. Together, his touch, the sky, the music, it all gave me a chance to forget for a moment just how horrible that case was. I knew that Morgan probably wasn’t taking it as well, since it had been personal for him, for some reason. But I couldn’t even take a moment to ponder his behavior while I was practically falling backwards into tranquility.

When I was little, Elle used to tell me that we would all turn into stars when we died. Now, of course, I knew that was a lie; but for the longest time, thinking that there was some other physical form waiting for us after life brought me comfort. When the world was quiet and life was peaceful, it was nice to think about that. Even now, I liked to think that Elle’s dad was up there in the sky, watching her and protecting her since I couldn’t. It made me feel better sometimes to think that there were people up there who could watch over me, my family, and my friends. When I couldn’t be there to protect people like Jack and Elle, maybe there was someone out there who was doing it for me.

At home, Hotch waited for me to walk around the car and meet me on the path in front of the house. After noticing how he was holding his hand out for me again, I balanced all of my things in my less dominant hand and intertwined my free fingers with his. As we walked up to the house, Hotch kissed my knuckles again. He had an obsession, I was convinced. I didn’t mind, however. I liked the comfort it brought me. I liked that it was a gentle, caring touch that silently told me that he loved me.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked him.

He nodded.

Hotch put his go-bag down so that he could open the door while still holding my hand. I thought about how Hotch was either going to just tear my clothes off and cuddle me or he’d actually give me the chance to get changed. I really wanted to go upstairs and throw on one of Hotch’s old sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants to go with it. His obsession was kissing my knuckles all the time, and mine was wearing his clothes around. It was nice.

The door opened and Hotch led me inside. We put our go-bags down on the floor and I sighed. “I’ll make the hot chocolate if you pick the movie.” He agreed by grabbing my hips and pulling me in for a passionate kiss that I had to push him away from before we could lose our breaths. “Pick a movie that we’ll actually end up watching.”

“What if I just pick one that we’ve already seen, that way it doesn’t matter if we miss some of it.” He grinned widely in response to the way I squinted at him. “Fine,” he threw his hands up in surrender. “As you wish.”

After I winked at him, I went to the kitchen. I sighed again as I grabbed two mugs from the cupboard, then two of the instant hot chocolate packets from the box next to the fridge. I turned on the electric tea kettle before leaning back against the kitchen island.

It was late, and I was somewhat tired, but a movie and a night with Hotch was the perfect way to wind down. In the morning, we’d probably call Haley to see if we could have Jack for a few days, and she’d probably say yes. She was good to us like that. She knew that with our unreliable schedules, every moment with Jack was practically borrowed time. She wanted to make sure that Jack got to see his dad as much as possible, and if that included giving him up and taking him in on random days without warning, then she was going to make it work. I liked that about her. It made her strong. It made her a good role model for Jack. It made her a good mom. In a way, I kind of envied her, actually. She had years with Hotch, and she had this connection with Jack that I would never have or be able to understand. If Hotch and I ever had kids, I just hoped that Haley would still be understanding with us. I somewhat hoped that she would actually be able to help. Her and Jessica were practically there at our every beck and call— which was a horrible way to put it, honestly… But I always wondered how they could do it. If Hotch and I got serious like that, I hoped that she could help me understand how to navigate it all.

When the water was hot, I poured equal amounts of water into our two mugs, then sifted in the hot chocolate powder. Hotch liked his hot chocolate scalding, unlike me. If it were too hot, I couldn’t drink it until it was practically room temperature. The way to find the right heat after practically boiling was to throw in a hidden ice cube with the marshmallows. Perfection.

I stepped back into the living room, carefully juggling the mugs while making sure that none of the marshmallows would hop out over the edge. “Alright, one order of hot chocolate for you— hold the ice cubes— and one hot chocolate for me with extra marshmallows and an ice cube.” I slowed my speed as I noticed that Hotch was getting off the phone. I prayed that it wasn’t work. We had just gotten back from that case, and I wasn’t too excited about jumping back into a new case yet. I just wanted to have a night to ourselves for once…

Hotch sniffled away a cry before turning to me with red eyes.

“Aaron?” I questioned worriedly, racing to put the mugs down. “Baby, what is it?” I sat down next to him and ran my fingers through his hair.

He cleared his throat as he found the bravery to say what was on his mind. “Penelope…” He hesitated. He never called her Penelope. Ever. More importantly, however, was the question running through my mind of why was he talking about her right now? What happened while I was gone in the kitchen? “She was shot,” he finally answered the question running through my mind before I could even ask.

I stopped petting his hair for a moment. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s on her way to St. Sebastian’s right now.”

“I—” I hesitated as I pushed myself to my feet, feeling how my head started spinning and my knees felt weak.

Garcia… How did this happen? Why her? When? Of all people, Garcia didn’t deserve to be hurt. Ever. She was the most innocent, precious being I had ever met. She would never hurt a soul. Why would someone shoot her? Our Penelope Garcia. This all felt so unfair. It all felt unreal. We needed to do something. We needed to be there for her. We needed the team to find out what happened—

Morgan.

Hotch reached out for my hand as I tried to stumble onto my feet. “I need to call Morgan,” I croaked, escaping Hotch’s grasp so that I could search for my phone. “Emily, JJ, and Reid went out for drinks, I think. You could, uh…” I brought my free palm up to my forehead while searching for Morgan’s number in my phone. “You can… You can call them—”

“Y/N,” he tried to catch my attention.

I brought the phone to my ear and listened as it rang a few times. Hotch was still trying to make me pay attention to him, but I had my back turned to him, my eyes trained on the floor, my hearing focused precisely on waiting to hear Morgan’s voice. How was I supposed to tell him this? Garcia meant the world to him. I knew that no matter how close Morgan and I would ever be, his connection with Garcia would remain ten times that. That was fine by me. I loved Morgan, and I loved Garcia. Morgan was my partner in the field, and my best friend in the entire world, if we were being honest. Having to tell him that the most important woman in his life had just been shot… It reminded me of when I got that call from Hotch after Elle was shot by Randall Garner.

Morgan and I had similar coping mechanisms. We connected through our traumatic pasts, and we grew close because of how we dealt with it, and how our platonic chemistry made us special. It was fine to work with him, to tease him, to have his back. But it was also a comfort to know that he was always there, no matter what. I knew that he would always understand me, and I would always understand him. When I found out about Elle, I practically shut down until I could hold someone I loved— Hotch, specifically— in my arms; at which point, I broke into pieces. I didn’t understand why it happened. Why Elle? Why us? I remembered feeling so desperate for answers, but there was nothing I could do. When Morgan would inevitably find out about Garcia, I knew that he would have the same reaction. I knew that this call was going to shut him down, turn him into a zombie of worry. I knew that he wouldn’t feel anything until he got to hold someone close, and then all of the questions and desperation would flood in. Why Penelope? Why us? Yet, no one would have any answers.

Morgan’s phone went straight to voicemail.

I cursed under my breath and tried again. Hotch stood from the couch, realizing that he wasn’t going to get me to talk to him yet. My mind was too far into thinking about Elle, Garcia, and Morgan to talk about if I was alright or not. I’d be fine when Garcia was okay. I’d be fine when Morgan would finally just pick up the damn phone. Maybe then I’d be willing to talk about how my head was spinning and I was fearing the worst. But until then, I just needed Hotch to call the rest of the team so that they could meet us at the hospital.

“Reid, Emily, and JJ are going to sober up and catch a taxi to the hospital,” Hotch said quietly from behind me.

I slowly turned on my heels, threw my arms up slightly on my sides in defeat, then whispered, “Morgan isn’t picking up.”

Hotch finally reached out to put a hand on my hip and practically drag me over to him. I reluctantly let him pull me, my feet stumbling under my mindless steps. His fingers dug into my hip slightly. When Elle was shot, Hotch immediately pulled me into a hug, even though our relationship had just gone public (unwillingly), and Gideon wasn’t too happy about it all. But Hotch still did it. He did it because he loved me, and he wanted to comfort a family member who had been put in harm’s way because of the job. But now we had another family member in the hospital, and neither of us were sure what to do. There shouldn’t have been a difference between Elle and Garcia, but there was, somehow. Hotch was paralyzed this time with me. He didn’t know what to do or what to say. But being able to touch me, to hold me, to grab me like he was on my hip, it brought him enough comfort to let his mind sort out all of his racing thoughts.

When we got home from the Feylinn case, we did what we normally did: tried to relax. Home was where we felt safe. Virginia and D.C. were supposed to feel safe, if we really wanted to broaden the area, but… Garcia was home. Garcia was in D.C. and she was hurt when she let her guard down, too. Why? Why couldn’t our team ever catch a break? Why did it seem like the world was always working against us? Why did the world have to go after the most innocent out of all of us?

“There are moments like this…” he whispered, “where I… I just don’t know what to say.” His other hand shook as he brought it to my hand and squeezed. “I—” he hesitated again. His eyes softened before he pressed his forehead to mine. “I love you.”

My free hand wrapped around his bicep. “She’s going to be okay.”

Hotch was always the one to give that reassurance, even if it was sometimes false. But there were times when someone just needed to hold him and tell him that it was going to be alright. With all of the burdens he carried around every day, there probably weren’t even a handful of instances where someone was able to ease his suffering. There were a million times where Hotch put everyone else before himself, but who else was there but me who could recognize his pain in his actions and his voice and understand that he needed comfort, even if he wasn’t going to admit it. Hotch was a stubborn man who had troubles with expressing how he really felt. It took him a long time to accept that it’s important to tell his loved ones every day how much they meant to him because time with them was never guaranteed, but he still struggled to come to terms with everything else. Confessing that he was worried about Garcia wasn’t going to happen, but I knew what he was thinking without him having to say it. I always knew it.

I kissed the end of his nose since our foreheads were still pressed together. “I love you, Aaron.”

Hotch’s hold on my hip tightened like he couldn’t find a better way to express how grateful he was for me. I understood the feeling. Sometimes there weren’t enough words— sometimes the words didn’t exist. “I love you” was a strong affirmation, but even then, it didn’t really convey what we meant. For me, at least, there was this strong urge in the pit of my stomach to constantly be by his side. It felt like this pull towards him that I could never ignore, no matter how hard I tried. That urge in return made his touches electric against my skin, which only made me yearn for him more. I felt like no matter how many times I could touch him or kiss him or tell him that I love him, it was never enough. Sometimes I asked myself if Hotch felt the same way, but then we’d have moments like this, and I knew that he actually felt it twice as hard, yet it pained him that he couldn’t show it as much.

“I’m worried about her, too…” I finally flung my arms around his neck and hugged him. His arms snaked around my waist and he pulled me as close to him as he possibly could. That urge had returned, and it wasn’t going away, especially not now. There was a tug in my heart when he kissed my neck. “Aaron.” I played with the ends of his hair. “Listen to me.” He nodded somewhat against my shoulder. “It’ll be alright. She’s at the hospital. She’ll be okay. I swear it. It’s okay to break, if you need to.” He shook his head. “Okay.” I knew that it wasn’t my place to push him. “I’m going to keep calling Morgan until he finally picks up.”

“We should go to the hospital,” he insisted, trying to part from our hug, but I held on tight.

“I love you, Aaron.” I wasn’t sure why the sudden urge to tell him that washed over me, but it did. We should have been spending all of our time and energy worrying about Garcia, of course, but there was a part of me that needed to stop and appreciate Hotch for a moment.

“I love you, too, Y/N.”

* * *

As we pulled up to the hospital, Hotch and I practically jumped out of the car before it was even off. We ran inside, racing around to find the emergency room. St. Sebastian was a huge hospital—bigger than the one that Elle had been taken to when she was shot. It was the hospital closest to our house, which was nice for getting there as soon as possible in situations like this, but finding anything or anyone within it was damn near impossible. You could ask twenty people where something was, and they wouldn’t even know, or they’d keep sending you around the hospital to find someone who did know because they were too scared to admit that they didn’t know.

Hotch searched around frantically, trying to find someone who could help. I turned to my left to look towards the O.R. and spotted a bloodied paramedic walking towards us. My brows furrowed and I ran up to him.

“’Scuse me,” I stopped him in his tracks. He looked up at me with shocked eyes. “Did you just bring in a gunshot victim?”

The paramedic glanced over his shoulder briefly. “I can’t disclose that information—”

“FBI,” Hotch said, flashing his credentials. “I’m her supervisor. What happened?”

The paramedic sighed. “It’s not looking good, if I’m being honest. We got her here just before she bled out, and the wound on her shoulder won’t stop bleeding. We can’t get the slug out until we get the bleeding under control— if we get the bleeding under control.”

I put my palm over my mouth to cover my shock and turned away from them. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. It was like finding out about Elle all over again, only this time there was no reassurance that everything was going to be okay. Instead, we were hit with the worst kind of odds. I hated it. I hated the asshole who did this to Garcia, and I hoped that he would eventually suffer for what he had done. It didn’t matter who he was. He shot an FBI tech analyst— he shot our family; and we weren’t going to just let that slide.

“I’ve gotta go,” the EMT insisted before running past myself and Hotch.

I heard Hotch step away from the hallway, probably to go think to himself. I didn’t blame him. We both needed some space— just for a moment, nothing too serious. My mind was wrapped around Garcia, Morgan, and Elle all at once. This was going to kill Morgan. I mean, rip his heart out of his chest, kill him. How was I supposed to tell him the truth? Maybe it was a good thing that he wasn’t picking up the phone.

I felt a comforting hand grab my shoulder, then the next thing I knew, Hotch was spinning me around and pulling me into his arms. My fingers curled around the back of his suit jacket. “I just talked to the local PD,” he whispered. I pulled back slightly to look at him. “They think it was a botched robbery.” I put my head back on his chest. “There aren’t any leads. As soon as the team gets here, I’ll head there to see how I can help.”

“No—” I begged. I didn’t want him to go anywhere.

This was all too similar to the Fisher King, and I wasn’t sure if I could survive it on my own. I needed Hotch there as a reassurance that he was safe. If he left, I wouldn’t be able to protect him. We were already one teammate short; I didn’t need Hotch to end up in the hospital, too. Even if this were just a one off, robbery gone wrong case, I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t lose him when things were falling apart.

“Hotch!” Reid called out from the elevator. We tore ourselves off of each other and looked down the hallway to see Reid, JJ, and Emily all running towards us. “Any news?”

“She’s still in surgery. We won’t know anything for another few hours.”

My eyes snapped to Hotch’s cheek, trying to understand why the hell he was holding back on telling them the whole truth. Garcia wasn’t doing well. Things weren’t looking good. The team deserved to know the truth, to prepare for the worst, didn’t they?

“Any word from Morgan?” Emily asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve been calling and calling, to no avail.”

“I’ll try for a bit, just to give you a break.”

“Thanks,” I croaked, smiling shortly.

“Let’s take a seat in the waiting room maybe?” Emily offered up to everyone.

We all silently nodded and followed her to the waiting room just down the hallway. On our way, we saw Rossi come out of the elevator next. He went directly to Hotch for answers while the rest of us went to sit down. Emily and JJ took a seat beside each other, working on trying to get ahold of Morgan, and Reid sat across from them, just watching and listening. I saw on the opposite side of the room, right next to the window. I looked out and up. I took notice of the stars again, thinking about how they were luminating the night just a little dimmer now. It almost felt like they were waiting for a new bright star to join them, and I prayed that it wouldn’t be Garcia. We weren’t ready to lose her yet. The sky wasn’t ready for her.

Hotch and Rossi came in a few minutes later, refusing to take a seat. They stood in their own corner, still whispering between each other. They liked to whisper. The two of them were thick as thieves, and I knew that was bad news for me. I mean, I liked that Rossi and I could exchange stories about Hotch, and it made him red with embarrassment and anger. But I also liked how they were just two friends who had been reunited after years apart, and they had so much to discuss. I didn’t mind that they whispered about things. I especially didn’t mind that they whispered about me. But in times like these, when we were all searching for answers and comfort, their whispers seemed unsettling.

Morgan came running out of the elevator, eyes searching down both ends of the hallway to see if he could spot us. When he found us, he stopped for a moment to register that this was really happening. I stood from my seat and let him stare at me for a moment as he still tried to understand. When I found out about Elle, I felt paralyzed for the longest time. Even when racing around the hospital, I remembered not being able to think about anything. I couldn’t even remember how I got from the parking lot where Hotch gave me the call to the hospital where he held me in his arms. But once I had him, once I heard him tell me that everything was going to be alright, I knew that I was going to be fine. Morgan needed that same comfort. He knew it.

His arms opened slightly as he started running up to me. I caught him in a tight hug, letting him hide his face in the crook of my neck. He was taller than me, but he was fine with leaning down to nuzzle slightly. I told him what he needed to hear, that he was okay, she was going to be okay, and that it was going to be okay.

“Are there any leads?” Morgan asked, forcing himself out of our embrace. He looked over my shoulder for a response from Hotch. There was silence, which meant that Hotch probably told him the truth: we knew absolutely nothing. “Is she going to be alright?”

“The nurses said that we could be hearing from the doctors any minute now,” Hotch answered.

“Speaking of which,” JJ said, nodding to the door.

A surgeon walked in just on time. He was still in his scrubs, his mask on his chin, his cap still tied to his head. We all stood at attention for him, and I grabbed Morgan’s hand while preparing for the worst. He looked around at all of us, taking in our worry, debating on how he should proceed. I wished that he would just spit it out. It was either good or bad news. Just rip the fucking band aid off. Please.

“She’s alive,” he finally admitted. Everyone sighed with relief. Morgan dropped my hand so that he could wipe his face with his palms. “She was shot in the lower shoulder, and the bullet ricocheted into her abdomen, but we were able to stop the bleeding, seal up the wounds, and make sure that there was no damage from the internal bleeding.”

“Will she be okay?” Morgan asked.

The doctor nodded. “Yeah. She’ll be able to leave the hospital in a few days. She’s still in a medically induced coma, but you’ll be able to see her in the morning.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Hotch said with a forced smile, his arms still crossed over his chest. 

He nodded politely with the smallest of sealed lip smiles before leaving the waiting room. We all turned to Hotch. The room felt so much lighter now. With relief having washed over us, we could focus on the next part of all of this: finding the son of a bitch who shot Penelope Garcia. We were ready to work.

“You should all stay here for when she wakes up,” Hotch began, taking note of how we were all waiting for our assignments. “I’ll go with Dave to the crime scene. The lead detective on the case doesn’t think there’ll be anything to find, but we’re still going to try. I don’t care about protocol; I don’t care about whether or not we have new cases to work on. We’re not doing anything until we solve this.”

Everyone agreed silently, taking their seats again in the break room. Rossi gestured to Hotch, and they made a step towards the exit, but I caught Hotch’s sleeve first. He turned slightly to look at me. I know I appeared desperate, my pleading eyes trying to make him stay. We didn’t know if this was a robbery, or a target on Garcia, or a target on the team. He could have potentially been putting himself in harm’s way by leaving the hospital. I didn’t want him to be the next person brought in on a stretcher.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he whispered, pressing his palm to my cheek. I lovingly nuzzled against his touch. “Morgan needs you.”

“I know. But I need you.”

“You were the one who told me that it would be alright. Do you still believe that?” he asked while tilting his head. I nodded. “Okay. Keep that faith. It’ll be alright. I love you.”

I kissed his palm before taking his hand in mine, then kissing his knuckles. He loved doing that with me, and I was simply curious as to why. I realized that it was so… intimate. So special. It was one thing to kiss someone on their lips, cheeks, neck, face, body; but kissing their knuckles was so humbling in the oddest of ways. It actually made me feel closer to him.

Hotch’s thumb caressed my hand lightly before he carefully pulled away and went with Rossi. He seemed driven, like he was trying to stop himself from coming back and staying with me. Honestly, I wasn’t going to stop him from doing either. I wanted him to stay, but I also wanted him to find who did this. I was just… confused. He probably was, too. I saw how broken he was back at the house, and now he had to bottle all of that up for the team. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like in his position. It was easy for any of us to break, but Hotch always seemed like an immovable, emotionless force at work. While I obviously knew that wasn’t the truth, and I knew that he was suffering inside every time something happened to our team or every time we had a case with kids; no one else knew the truth. I had to share the burden of his silent struggle. I could see with my own eyes that it was killing him, yet no one else, even with all of their profiling skills, could seem to figure it out. To them, Hotch was an enigma, and they were fine with not solving him.

I sighed quietly to myself as I sat down next to Morgan. His head was in his hands, his elbows propped up on his knees. Just as I expected, he was a mess. He had probably put his emotions on pause while racing to the hospital, then when he finally saw that this was all really happening, he didn’t know how to cope. Garcia was his everything. He couldn’t bear to lose her in the way that I couldn’t bear to lose him.

“I miss Elle every day,” I spoke up in a hushed tone. Morgan did move or say anything. “I don’t think Hotch knows how painful it is to go through every second of every day knowing that he was the last person she spoke to before disappearing. He doesn’t tell me anything about her leaving and I don’t ask, but… I still think about her all the time.” I leaned back slightly. “Tonight, when we got home from the Feylinn case, we were in the car, and I looked up at the stars, and I thought about her again. For the first time in decades, I was reminded of a tale she told me where we all turn into stars when we die. I actually thought to myself that we have all of our loved ones up there, looking after us, protecting us, and I thought that nothing bad could happen. And then we got the call… No one was looking after Garcia, no one was protecting her. Something terrible happened and we weren’t there to stop it. I hate Elle for putting that dumb star idea in my head, but even more so because I thought I was over it, and the one time I stop to think that maybe she was right, the whole world seems to come crashing down.”

“Y/N…” he croaked quietly. “I can’t lose her.”

“I know.” I linked my arm with his slowly, somewhat forcing him out of the hunched position he was in. “But they said that she’s going to be fine.”

“I feel like this is my fault,” he finally admitted.

“You can’t believe that—”

“I do. After Feylinn, I’ve been thinking long and hard about God and religion… I prayed for the first time last night, Y/N. For the first time since my dad made me when I was a little kid. What are the odds that I do that, and it ends with Penelope on the table?”

“Derek,” I whispered, snaking my hand down to intertwine our fingers, “this is not your fault. I need you to hear me. No one could have stopped this.”

“I could’ve!” he said a little too loudly. “If I didn’t make her mad, she wouldn’t have blown me off, and I would have been there to save her!”

“Shh…” I cooed, squeezing his hand. I rested my cheek on his shoulder. “I promise it’s not your fault. The guy who did this is the only one responsible.”

“When am I supposed to start believing that?”

I paused and thought for a beat. “When we catch him.”

* * *

The sun started peeking over the buildings outside of the hospital when a nurse approached us. The stars that had been taunting us all night were finally gone, and so was the fear that Garcia would be joining them. There was another wave of relief in the room when the nurse came to collect us. We were all eager to see Garcia and to make sure that she was alright.

“Hi, my loves,” Garcia cooed before any of us could say anything. JJ walked up and took her hand. “No tears…” She reached up and wiped JJ’s cheek with her thumb. “I’m glad you guys are here. Thank you.”

We all smiled lightly at her. Her voice was so quiet and raspy, not at all like the Penelope Garcia we knew. Usually, she was loud, bubbly, and optimistic, but the surgery and the drugs had worn her down. I didn’t blame her for not being normal Penelope. In fact, I was glad that she was getting a break for once. After what happened, she just needed to rest. We would ask for our Garcia back when she was better.

“How are you feeling?” Morgan asked worriedly.

Garcia nodded vaguely. “I’m okay. I mean, I’ve been better… but… I’ll be okay.”

I hesitated as I looked around the room. I knew that we needed to ask her about the incident and about the Unsub in order to help Hotch and Rossi at the crime scene, but I didn’t want to push her either. There was a chance that she couldn’t be ready to talk about it, or maybe she couldn’t even remember anything. Either way, we needed to try. As much as it pained me to do it, I had to ask as quickly as possible.

I stepped forward slightly. “Are you up for answering some questions?” Garcia looked at me and nodded again. “Do you remember what happened?”

She cleared her throat, then said, “Yeah… I…” She chuckled to herself shortly. “I never saw it coming. He seemed so… nice.”

“You know him?”

“Mhm.” She looked up at Morgan, “You were right. I should have trusted my gut. I knew that there was something wrong about that guy from the coffee shop, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it, so I tried to ignore it. I just wanted to believe that he was into me.”

“What happened, Garcia?”

“He was dropping me off at home after our date. We were standing just outside, and he went to kiss me… I thought… I thought he was just nervous when he walked away suddenly. And then he turned around, and he shot me.”

“Do you have any idea why he would have done this?” Emily inquired.

“No. I just thought he liked me.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked, taking control of the situation again.

Garcia hesitated. After a moment of looking around at all of us, she nodded, a tear falling down her cheek. “James Colby Baylor.”

As I made eye contact with Morgan, I grabbed my phone from my back pocket. “I’ll call Hotch to let him know.” I stepped out of Garcia’s hospital room and quietly entered the hallway. I leaned up against the wall and dialed Hotch’s number quickly, praying that he would pick up. I didn’t want to chase him around like I had to with Morgan, and I didn’t want to worry about him like I was with Garcia. Thankfully, though, Hotch answered the phone fairly fast. “Hotch?”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve got an I.D. on the guy. He went on a date with her, then when he went to wish her goodnight at her place, he shot her.”

Hotch sighed on the other end. “Makes sense. We weren’t sure why he did it in the courtyard, but that answers that. There’s not much else to find here, unfortunately. He used a revolver, so there’s no—”

“No bullet casing for evidence,” I finished, my shoulders falling in defeat. “If he’s smart enough to clean the crime scene, then the name he gave her is probably just an alias.”

“I know. I’m going to get in contact with another tech analyst back at the office and see if they can start digging around. Send me the name Garcia gave you. For now, just stay at the hospital with Garcia and Morgan. They both need you.”

Someone tapped my shoulder from behind me. I turned, the phone still pressed to my ear, to find that it was Reid. He whispered that Garcia wanted to see me and Morgan, but I shook my head at him. “I’ve gotta go, Hotch.” I hung up the call before he could say anything else and dug it into my pocket. “I can’t go back in there, Reid,” I told him quietly. He cocked a brow. “It reminds me too much of Elle.”

Reid’s face softened. “You know, I heard what you told Morgan last night about the stars…” I bit the inside of my cheek and turned my gaze to the floor. Of course, of all people, the great Dr. Spencer Reid had to hear me talking about stars and afterlife. He was probably preparing himself to give me a whole speech about what actually happens to us when we die and the science of stars and whatnot— “I liked it.”

My attention snapped back up to him. “What?”

“I mean, it’s not realistic, and I think we all know that, but… in times like these, when we need a little hope, it’s nice to hear. So, I just… I wanted to thank you.”

“Reid—” I didn’t know what to say.

The two of us were never close, which was why we never really talked or paired up in the field. It was always me and Morgan— and sometimes Emily— against the world. Reid did his own smart thing elsewhere while we went to go talk to witnesses or look at crime scenes. The two of us never sat around to get to know one another, but we never even got a chance to talk like this, which was so weird considering how I did still consider him as family. Our family included everyone on the team, even the people I didn’t get to chat with too often, like Reid and JJ. Their pain, what they were going through right now, was just as valid as the rest of us. Hell, they had been on the team longer than me, so of course it mattered. I was glad that I could help Reid somehow, even though I didn’t initially realize that was the case.

“I’ll stay with Morgan while they talk,” Reid offered, changing the subject quickly.

“Thank you, Reid.” I searched his eyes for a moment so that he knew I meant it. He smiled and gave a short nod before turning to go back to Garcia’s hospital room while I returned to the waiting room with Emily and JJ. “You guys okay?” I asked them, taking a seat beside them.

“I will be once we find this guy,” Emily answered.

“Same,” JJ agreed.

I stayed silent for a moment, then offered, “We could head back to the office and start building a profile…” They both looked at me. “I’m just saying.”

“You’re right,” Emily said as she stood, “Garcia wouldn’t want us to just sit around and mope. If she could, she’d be in her office right now, searching for who did this.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have any evidence,” JJ scoffed.

“That’s never stopped us before.”

We all looked at each other. We had an alias, we had the kind of gun he used, we knew what happened at the crime scene, Morgan and Reid could do a cognitive with Penelope to build a behavioral profile. To be honest, we actually had more than JJ was leading on. If we looked at this like it was any other case, and we started with victimology, we could make our way from there. And with Hotch and Rossi heading back to the office to meet with another tech analyst for help, we could honestly find the son of a bitch that did this to Garcia. If we just put our mind to it, we could do this. So we left.

* * *

Hotch and Rossi were already holed up in Garcia’s office with the new technical analyst that was going to help us by the time Emily, JJ, and I made it back to the office. We snuck by undetected, and we made our way into the boardroom where we started setting up shop. It was like Hotch expected that we would come back to start working the case because evidence photos were spread around the roundtable, and what little physical evidence and files they had were piled in a brown confidential box. I silently thanked Hotch for knowing us all well enough to have this ready for when we got there so that we could just dive right in.

I started by hanging up all of the photos on our board, using string to connect any similarities or clues that I spotted. Garcia lived in an apartment building that was built in the shape of a U around a simple courtyard with a cheap, rip-off, hadn’t-been-turned-on-in-a-decade fountain. Garcia had been led through that courtyard with her date, this James Colby Baylor guy, and all the way up to the front steps of her building. He got her comfortable, made her feel like she could let her guard down for just a moment while he complimented her and nearly made a move to kiss her. When she wasn’t prepared for it, he stepped towards the fountain like he was about to leave, then he turned around and shot her. Thinking that he had done what he needed, he ran away, leaving her to bleed out on the steps.

Emily froze when she saw me hang up the photo of the pool of Garcia’s blood that had still been on the steps when the cops started casing the scene.

“Just remember she’s okay,” I said. She nodded and turned back to keep looking through the files. “Hopefully Hotch and Rossi can find something about James Colby Baylor soon because that’s our only lead so far.”

“How could a random mugger plan to use a revolver and leave no fingerprints at the scene? This all feels premeditated,” Emily said.

I agreed with her. Things weren’t adding up. I mean, we knew that he wasn’t a mugger because he went on a date with Garcia, but Emily brought up a good point. This wasn’t a date gone wrong or something like that. Whoever did this, whatever his name really was, he chose Garcia on purpose. There was something else that was really going on with this guy and Garcia. Hopefully Morgan and Reid would be able to find out more while talking to her as the morphine wore off.

“Um…” JJ mumbled, staring out the windows of the board room. Emily and I looked up from the evidence. “What’s wrong with Hotch?”

I raised a brow before walking around the table to see what was going on. Hotch had just left Garcia’s office from the left, and he was storming out to the elevators in the hallway. His face was sour and stern as he pressed the floor level button and tried to avoid making eye contact with the three of us in the boardroom as we watched him. Something must have happened when they were in Garcia’s office, but I wasn’t sure what. I had never seen Hotch that angry with a teammate, or with anything at work, before. Whenever I made him really mad, he’d get like that, but I always knew that I had done it and he’d calm down after punishing me. But with someone at work? Especially Garcia? Something had to be very, very wrong.

“Internal Affairs just ended our involvement with the case,” Rossi explained as he entered the room through the back entrance from the break room. We all turned to face him. “Hotch had to alert them about a protected file that Garcia has on her computer.”

“What the hell?” Emily inquired.

“They think that Garcia could be a security risk?” I asked.

Rossi shrugged. “Hotch is headed to the hospital now to ask her about it, but… now that Internal Affairs is involved, we’ve been taken off the case and she’s been suspended.”

“That’s bullshit. Garcia would never—”

“I know,” Rossi nodded, “but we have our orders. When they come to take everything, you need to let them.”

“No way,” JJ insisted. “This is ours.”

“Not anymore.”

We all looked out the windows again to see an agent from Internal Affairs walking up the boardroom. I cringed as he made eye contact with us and actually tried to smile at us. They couldn’t actually believe that Penelope Garcia was a security risk. She was an imperative piece of our unit— and even more so with the Bureau. She loved her job; she loved the agency. Garcia wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our family. She knew better. And Internal Affairs shouldn’t have been getting involved. I knew that Hotch had to call it in, but he should have waited until he could talk to us or Garcia.

When he came in, he got right to work with tearing down all of the photos I had practically just finished hanging up. As he did so, he explained who he was, why he was there, and how we could help. He instructed JJ and Emily to pack up all of the files and evidence that they had been looking through, and hand it over to him. I watched them hesitate, and they looked to Rossi for the order to not listen to I.A., but he wasn’t giving in. So Emily and JJ started doing as they were told— reluctantly, but they still ended up doing it.

“Is this really necessary?” Emily bit at him quietly.

The I.A. agent let out a disappointed sigh, “Yes, this is necessary.”

“A federal agent was just shot, and you’re choosing to investigate her rather than find the guy who nearly killed her,” JJ said as equally sour as Emily was.

With how things were going with Strauss and the close eye she was keeping on mine and Hotch’s behavior, I couldn’t afford to start an argument with Internal Affairs. As much as I would have loved to have given that guy a piece of my mind, if I overstepped in any way, he could have gone to Strauss, and I would get in trouble again. Strauss told me to be careful because she wouldn’t give me another chance again. While I usually wouldn’t listen to Strauss, she literally held my fate in her hands. For now, Emily and JJ would have to pick this fight alone, unfortunately.

“Look,” the agent gave in, “I am sorry that this has to happen like this, but it is happening. The best thing you can do is just cooperate.”

“We should at least be able to keep working on the case—”

“This is part of the case, Agent Prentiss. We need to know what it is that she’s involved in and if it has to do with why she was shot.”

“She’s not involved in anything,” JJ rolled her eyes.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes,” all three of us responded.

The I.A. agent chuckled to himself. “Do you know why it is that the FBI hired her?” We all exchanged a glance of confusion, which he took note of, so he smugly continued. “She tried to hack the FBI, but she was on our radar long before that. The Bureau keeps track of potential problems, and we dictate what to do with them once we have them. Sometimes it’s safer to utilize them rather than lock them in a box and throw away the key.”

“So she was hired because she was dangerous?” I laughed. Garcia wasn’t a danger. She was the furthest thing from that. Garcia couldn’t even hurt a fly, I was convinced. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not. There’s a lot you don’t know about your friend, Agent Greenaway. My suggestion is that you let the people who do know the whole truth do their jobs. It’ll make everything much easier.” He picked up the box of evidence that we had unpacked, and he repacked, and before we could argue anything else, he left.

I looked at Rossi, who was standing to the side, still silent, still trying to blend into the wall. JJ and Emily sat down at the roundtable, left with nothing to do. We had made our way to the office in the hopes of getting to help Garcia, but, of course, the Bureau wasn’t going to make things easy for us. They never made things easy. But now we had nothing to do, and we weren’t even at the hospital to pass time while waiting with Garcia.

* * *

Four days after we got that call about Garcia and we still had no new leads. We thought it would be an easy open and shut case because our witness was alive— thankfully— and we had the Unsub’s name. Yet, we were still falling short of finding any actual real answers, and being taken off of the case by Internal Affairs wasn’t exactly helping matters. Any information we did have, and any theories we had built since then were all based around memory, and would all be inadmissible in any case or court.

Garcia had since been released from the hospital, and Morgan was about to take her home to keep an eye on her. After being sent home early from the office because we were taken off the case and our work hours were over at around four, Hotch and I took the evening to make up for the movies and hot chocolate night we didn’t get after the Feylinn case. I snuggled into Hotch’s clothes, and he got into a pair of pajama pants and a tight t-shirt— which really wasn’t doing any favors for me because I genuinely wanted to stay focused on the movie and not his arms and chest. I made hot chocolate again, this time we actually got around to drinking it, and Hotch just held me in his arms.

By the time we had gone through two movies (one of his choosing and one of mine), we were both exhausted. I thought about just sleeping on the couch, but he complained about being too cold and uncomfortable, so we slowly and groggily made our way upstairs to our room to fall asleep. As we got into bed, Hotch pulled the sheets and comforter up all the way to our chins, then he pulled me close to him so that we were spooning. I smiled to myself and kissed the inside of his left elbow because that was the one trapped under me.

And then his damn phone started ringing.

Hotch sighed in my ear, his arms releasing their hold around me as he turned over to grab his phone. I whined, trying to push my back up against his chest again to coax him back into cuddling me, but he ignored me long enough to answer the call. When I heard him hum a listening tone, he rested his chin on my shoulder and held me in his arms again. We didn’t have any ongoing cases, and with Internal Affairs all up in our business, we weren’t likely to get a new case. So it definitely wasn’t work. The real question was, who was calling so late?

“Morgan, you better have a damn good reason—” Hotch stopped in his tracks, and I could vaguely hear Morgan ranting about something on the other end. Within a startling instant, Hotch sat up, practically lifting me with him. After yawning and wiping the sleep out of my eyes, I pulled the sheet over my chest. “Okay, okay, okay,” Hotch said quickly, yet calmly, like he was trying to get Morgan to slow down. “We’ll be there in a few minutes. Call the rest of the team.” Hotch hung up the phone, and I looked at him. “Someone tried to get into Garcia’s place.”

I pushed the bedding off my body and raced to the closet. “What about the officer outside? And Morgan? Did he catch him?” I asked while throwing on some clothes.

Hotch joined me in the closet and started getting ready, too. “The officer on duty outside her apartment is dead, and Morgan couldn’t catch him in time.”

“Did he get a good look at the Unsub?”

“He says it’s definitely the guy who tried to kill Garcia.”

“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath. “They’re both okay?”

“They sound pretty shaken up, but I think they’ll be fine.”

I went back to the bedroom and grabbed my gun and credentials. Hotch came out of the closet, handing me a pair of shoes, and I thanked him quickly. He grabbed his things, too, and by the time I had my shoes on, we were ready to go. He held his hand out for me, waiting by the door for me to catch up. I took his hand, and he started pulling me downstairs, to the alarm— which I set— and then all the way out to the car. For the brief minute where we settled in our seats, got buckled, and Hotch started the car, we weren’t touching each other, but the moment he started backing out of the driveway, Hotch was holding my hand again.

I lifted his hand to my mouth and kissed his knuckles again. “I love you.”

I could tell that he needed the reassurance while navigating his way to Garcia’s apartment. She had only just gotten home, and we had finally decided to get some rest, and things went to shit again. I was sure that he felt somewhat responsible considering he turned her into I.A., which meant that she couldn’t go back to the office, so her only option was her apartment. But it wasn’t his fault. He had to know that. He didn’t do this. He couldn’t control this anymore than he could have controlled what happened the other night.

This was just another fluke. Our jobs were dangerous, and our lives could get crazy sometimes, but this was just one of those times where it seemed like things kept piling on and we couldn’t stop it. The good news, however, was that we could stop it. There was no way in hell now that we would let I.A. walk all over us and take us off this case. Even if it put mine and Hotch’s jobs in jeopardy again, we were going to find the guy who was doing this to Garcia, and we were going to put an end to it. Hotch just had to keep that in mind and keep his eye on the prize. This wasn’t his fault, and instead of blaming himself, he needed to put his focus into helping Garcia.

When we arrived at Garcia’s place, cops were already barricading off the street to make sure that only officials could get through. Hotch had to roll down his window as we approached and flash his badge at the officer standing by, and then we had to wait for them to move the barricade. Up ahead, it looked like Emily, Reid, JJ, and Rossi were already there, but Rossi was the only one still outside. Hotch parked us in the middle of the road, just in front of Garcia’s building, and Rossi came over to open my door like a true gentleman.

“They’re still barring us from the case,” he told us both as we got out of the car.

The three of us headed towards the courtyard where the lead detective was waiting. We passed the coroners who were bagging up the body of the cop who was killed by the Unsub while he was on duty to protect Garcia. I tried not to look over and think about how that could have been Morgan and Garcia, too.

“The Bureau says they don’t want you here,” the detective said.

“We’re just here to comfort a friend,” Hotch insisted, though we all saw through the lie.

“I don’t care what they say,” he admitted to us. “This guy killed one of us. Any help you can offer, I’ll take it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m sick of being behind this guy,” Rossi ranted. “We gotta end this.”

We all nodded and continued into the building so that we could see Garcia, and potentially talk to her and Morgan about what happened. When we entered her apartment, everyone was surrounding her, comforting her, trying to talk her through it. She was very clearly shaken. Between hugging her pillow close to her chest, resting her head on Morgan’s shoulder, and listening to everyone’s kind words, she looked like she was trying to calm down, but it would certainly take a while. Hotch immediately interrupted everyone by insisting that we take Garcia back to the hospital because that was where she would be safest, but she, of course, had to argue it.

“No, I want to stay here,” she insisted. “I’m starting to remember more. Maybe if I stay here, I’ll be able to remember all of it, and that can help you guys.”

I looked at Hotch. She was right. If her cognitives were finally starting to work at her house, in a familiar setting, then it might benefit us to keep her at home. As long as the whole team was with her, she’d be safe. We wanted to help her, right? Well, this was the best way to do it. There was no denying it. So Hotch gave in with a nod and let the team continue their questioning.

“Tell us about his car,” Reid encouraged, leaning forward in his seat. “You said it was a white, 4-door, American. What else?”

Garcia closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “His seatbelt was buckled behind his back.”

My eyes widened slightly. Hotch and I exchanged a worried glance. There were only two kinds of people who sat with their seatbelts behind them: reckless people or police. For the most part, Hotch and I were pretty good about using our seatbelts, but if we were in the field and needed to jump out quickly, then we wouldn’t bother with them. If Garcia’s memory was correct, then there was a very good chance that the man who did this to her was a fed.

“Garcia,” Rossi said, sitting down in front of her, “You need to be straight with us right now.” He sounded angry and demanding—not at all as how I had seen him before. I figured that Hotch would be the one to finally snap at her because his fuse was always short, but Rossi surprised me. Garcia seemed taken aback, too, because she looked around to us for help. Rossi caught her with, “Don’t look at them, look at me.”

“I’m not hiding anything,” she said confidently and defensively.

“You got shot. Most people get shot for a reason. You’ve got a room full of people here who love you and are willing to believe that an FBI agent is trying to kill you. Now, I don’t know you all that well yet, so I’m going to need a little more convincing. We need to know everything you do on company time—which includes whatever the hell was on that file you secured.

“I—” Garcia hesitated, trying to look at Morgan, but Rossi wouldn’t let her. “It’s—It’s nothing—”

“Spit it out!”

“Rossi!” I yelled at him, but he held a silencing hand up at me.

“Tell us!”

“It’s nothing bad!” Garcia raised her voice, too, but out of fear rather than anger like the rest of us. “I counsel families of unsolved cases, and sometimes I’ll mark cases as imperative so they get reviewed faster.”

Hotch crossed his arms over his chest and said, “You’re not authorized to do that, Penelope.”

“I know,” she agreed while nodding and her voice shaking, “but I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah, but whoever was working those cases thinks you’re watching them now.”

“I just wanted to put pressure on them so that they don’t slide!”

“How many cases are we talking about?”

“I don’t know… Seven or eight, maybe? I would have to get into my system to know.”

“You can’t. You’re still suspended.”

“Wait a minute,” Morgan interrupted. “Garcia, you said that on your date, this guy was pressing you for information about your job—specifically if you were working murder cases.” Garcia nodded along. “Hotch, we’ve gotta look at those files. Whatever connecting piece there is in them, it has to be our Unsub.”

“We can’t do anything while Internal Affairs is watching us all at the office.”

“Yeah, but if we do it from here…”

Hotch sucked in a breath through his teeth while looking over at Rossi for a hint about what our next play should be. Honestly, it wasn’t a good idea and it probably wasn’t legal, but if Garcia could get into the system at home, find who the Unsub was, then get out before anyone could notice, it would do us some good. The only downside to all of this was that if Garcia did get caught, and considering Strauss’s tunnel vision on him and getting rid of him, she’d fire Hotch without hesitation. But, then again, it was still our best shot. Weighing the options, it could save Penelope’s life vs. Hotch losing his job. Unfortunately, the answer was fairly obvious.

Hotch released his crossed arms. “Alright. Dave, Y/N, JJ, and I will all go back to the office to maintain face and to keep I.A.’s focus on us. In the meantime, Morgan, Reid, and Prentiss, stay with Garcia. Don’t forget to log out of the damn system, understand?” Everyone nodded. He looked to me and Rossi, “Let’s go.”

* * *

When we walked into the BAU’s office, I spotted the Internal Affairs agent sitting at the table in the break area. He had cleared off everyone’s stuff, including the donuts Anderson brought in since everyone was going to have a late night, obviously; and he set up all of his work for his investigation into Garcia. It wasn’t right that he was there. I mean, they shouldn’t have launched an investigation into Garcia’s integrity while still searching for the person who shot her. There had to be priorities, right? Why was Internal Affairs taking a sealed file more seriously than an agent getting shot? It made my blood boil.

That being said, we knew we had to keep our cool. If we were going to buy Garcia and the others time, then we needed to proceed as usual. Hotch and Rossi went up to their offices on the balcony, while I stopped at my desk to grab some files. In the car, Hotch and I discussed potentially “reviewing some old cases” in his office, which really just meant that we were going to pretend like we were doing work while anxiously awaiting a call from the team with some news. If we just played this smart, we’d find the Unsub soon— since we were clearly the only ones who cared— and all would be forgiven. The investigation into Garcia and her work with the Bureau would ultimately turn out to be useless. She’d be reinstated soon, and things could just… go back to normal. But first we had to play this torturously long waiting game.

As I took my files from my desk in the bullpen up to Hotch’s office, I saw that the Internal Affairs agent stood from his seat in the break area to meet an officer at the front doors of the BAU. I furrowed my brows. They shook hands, greeted each other professionally, then headed over to Anderson’s desk where the tech analyst helping I.A. was sitting. I rolled my eyes, figuring it probably had to do with burying Penelope’s career rather than actually trying to save her. Assholes.

I stepped into Hotch’s office and closed the door behind me. He nodded towards one of the seats at his desk across from him, a silent gesture for me to get comfortable. As I sat down and put the files on his desk, Hotch tried to grab the top one, but I stopped him by putting my hand over his. We glared at each other shortly, a challenge to see who would let up first. Hotch wanted to work on some of my reports. Of course he did. But he already had a stack of his own, and we didn’t need a repeat of the Mulford case report. So he needed to work on his files, and I needed to work on mine. I get that he was just trying to help since he still felt somewhat responsible for my suspension, and me sub dropping the other day, and he felt like shit for going behind my back; but I wasn’t going to let him make it up to me by doing my work. Hell, he technically already made it up to me. How could he forget my reward the other day? Idiot.

“Come on,” he encouraged, trying to tug the file away from me. I narrowed my eyes and pulled against him. “Y/N.”

“Aaron.”

His glare strengthened. “I don’t want to look at my reports anymore. I’ve hit a wall with all of mine. Let me help you.”

I smacked his hand away playfully, managing to get a better grip on the file after he was caught off guard. I snatched the file and dropped it in my lap. “No.”

“No?”

I gulped. “We’re at work. Rules, Agent Hotchner. Remember our rules?”

He licked his teeth, a sign that he was getting angry and frustrated. “At some point, when this is over, and we’re back at home— where there are no rules, Agent Greenaway— I’m going to put you over my knee and show you what ‘no’ gets you.” He grabbed the next file on the top of my pile. “Don’t ever ask me about the rules again.” I cleared my throat as I looked down at the report I was holding. “What do you say?”

“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

“Good girl.”

“I’ve gotta stop locking that door behind me…” I whispered under my breath.

“What was that?”

My eyes shot wide. I hadn’t realized that I said it aloud. I had been thinking about how every time I closed his office door behind me, leaving the two of us to speak privately, Hotch always seemed to forget that we were at work, and he let his dominant personality take over. It wasn’t like I didn’t enjoy it. I loved it. But he was literally the one who made the rules in the first place, and yet he seemed to be the worst about upholding them. I tried my best because I didn’t want the professional or personal consequences that would come with talking out of turn, but Hotch seemed to lose his filter when we were alone. It might’ve been due to the superior aspect that came with his job. Hotch liked having control over me. He liked telling me what to do in the bedroom, around the house, in the field, and in moments like these when we were alone and could speak freely. Being my boss probably allowed him to maintain that excitement of controlling me without being obvious. But being alone with me while at work, it was like a big stirring pot of all the things he loved about our relationship, and he just couldn’t seem to hold himself back.

That was why closing the door was always a bad idea. It gave him the privacy to demand things of me, to talk dirty to me, to tease me endlessly because he knew we were at work, and he knew that we had our rules. Every time he toyed with me like this, it made me want him to the point that I’d jump on him if the blinds on his windows overseeing the bullpen weren’t open. He knew that about me. He knew that I’d get on my knees for him under his desk if he asked me to. But he also knew that the two of us were being extremely cautious since Strauss was watching us like a hawk. He knew that he could torture me privately like this, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That was the fun of the game. That was what excited him most.

But if I just left the door open… What could he do? Nothing. That was why I thought it, but I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. When Hotch caught me, he knew what I meant, and I knew that I was digging myself into a hole that I could only escape once he punished me for it. He had been playing around with the “no” thing because I practically baited him, but my little slip up wasn’t a game. When he once had enough self-restraint to not flat out start sliding into dom space yet, he was now entirely Sir. I was screwed. Once this case was over, I was sure that I wasn’t going to be let off the bed for… well… until the next case would call us in.

“Sir—”

“Not another word from you,” he said gruffly, looking down at the file he grabbed.

The self-discipline it took to not go over to the windows, close the blinds, then punish me then and there was killing him, I could see it. He had practically involuntarily slid into dom space, and it was going to take him forever to calm down. I almost wanted to apologize, but I had been given my command. With how deep into it I already was, there was no point in pushing back. While I would’ve been bratty about it in the past, just because I could, I knew that we really needed to focus on Penelope. It was fun to forget about reality from time to time. We liked spending a few minutes forgetting about everything going on around us. It was hard being in our field without taking a moment to remember who we were and how much we loved each other. People probably wouldn’t understand our dynamic. They would look down on it and turn their noses up at how we could act like this between talking about work and focusing on cases. But it was hard to take everything seriously all the time. If we didn’t appreciate who we were when things got too dark, then we’d lose our minds.

My phone started ringing. Talk about saved by the bell. I scrambled for it nervously, acutely aware that Hotch was paying attention to my floundering, despite how his eyes were focused on the report. I took a look at the caller ID, Morgan, before answering quickly.

“Sunshine, I need you to listen very carefully,” he said in a panic before we could greet one another. I continued to stay silent, waiting for what he had to say. “The Unsub’s in the BAU. He’s the deputy sheriff that’s standing next to the I.A. agent at Anderson’s desk.” My eyes shot wide. “Stop— Stop reacting.” My face fell flat. “Do you see him?”

I didn’t have to look over to see who Morgan was talking about. When I had been walking up to Hotch’s office, I saw the officer, and originally thought nothing of it. But now he was in the middle of the FBI. “I got him,” I answered calmly. Hotch looked up at me. He was trying to get a read on what was happening. “What do you want us to do?”

“Don’t approach him. Don’t let him know we’re onto him. We profiled him, and he’s a classic narcissist with a hero homicide complex—”

“And he’s spiraling?”

Morgan hummed an agreement. I swallowed hard, still trying to keep my cool.

If he was spiraling, that meant that he was going to go down shooting. The profile of Unsubs with hero homicide complexes included that they were sociopaths that didn’t even care about their own wellbeing if they knew that they were approaching the end. If Morgan was right— which, I trusted that he was— then our Unsub was going to take as many people as possible down with him if he even got a whiff of us closing in on him. Taking him down was going to be hard, especially since he was an armed, trained officer. It didn’t matter that nearly everyone down in the bullpen had guns. If he took even one person hostage, we were screwed.

“I’ll tell Hotch. Thanks.”

“Be careful.”

“Yeah.” I hung up the phone and cautiously put it in my pocket. “Deputy in the bullpen,” I told Hotch.

He glanced out of the corner of his eye, clocking who I was referencing. “They’re sure?” I nodded. “What’s the profile?”

“Hero homicide.”

Hotch let out a quiet breath. “Okay. I’ll get Dave. I want you to go down the ramp just out front, not the one to the side. Go through the bullpen to get to your desk, grab your things, and try to make your way to the doors like you’re waiting for us to join you there. We’re going to surround him quietly and carefully. Understood?” I nodded again. “Go.”

I pushed myself out of my seat and started calmly walking out of Hotch’s office. He was just behind me, opening the door for me like a true gentleman. As I stepped down the ramp just ahead, Hotch took a sharp turn to the left to walk on the balcony. The deputy in the bullpen, along with the Internal Affairs agent and tech analyst, were focused on the computer in front of them. They were too busy to even notice how the office was moving around them… How I was watching them out the corner of my eye.

As I grabbed my purse from under my desk, Rossi opened his office door in response to Hotch knocking politely. They exchanged a few whispers, glancing down in the bullpen to look at the deputy and me. I nodded vaguely, a signal that I knew the plan and I was going to make my move. After taking note of Hotch’s lingering stare, I nervously bit my lip and took a brave step towards the doors. My eyes shifted to the deputy instinctively. When we made eye contact by accident, I cursed under my breath, and kept trying to move, my hands free and ready to reach for my weapon on my hip whenever.

I glanced over my shoulder quickly, noting that Rossi and Hotch had split up to take opposite corners of the room. My eyes met Hotch’s again, and I tried to look for a signal, knowing that I couldn’t make it any further without raising suspicions. The plan was for me to head to the doors, but he already knew. If I stepped any closer, the deputy would probably take the I.A. agent or the analyst hostage, or he would just start shooting without warning. But the signal I needed from Hotch didn’t come. He couldn’t give it yet. The three of us still needed to move into a better position.

“Well, thank you for coming in, Deputy,” the Internal Affairs agent smiled up at the officer.

Whatever it was they had been doing on Anderson’s computer, they were done. Maybe this would work itself out. If the deputy left, we could arrest him down in the parking lot where there weren’t innocent agents Hotch was responsible for in harm’s way. This could actually go well. All of our fretting could have possibly been for nothing, if we were lucky.

“Thank you for hearing me out. I’m sorry about all of this,” the deputy responded in kind.

“Oh, that’s no worries. We’re just happy to help—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Before we knew it, the deputy reached out, locking the I.A. agent in a choke hold. Just as Hotch, Rossi, and I unholstered our weapons, the deputy pointed the barrel of his gun at the agent’s head. Everyone, including the analyst sitting just in front of them, fell to the ground, trying to find cover under the desks. He got smart, pressing his back against the corner by the glass doors before I could get there. From where Hotch, Rossi, and I were all standing around the office, none of us could get a clear shot. I mean, if we wanted to take the I.A. agent down with the deputy, then, sure, we could make the shot. But we weren’t going to do that. Our only plan of action now was to diffuse the tension— though, it was probably going to be useless if we were relying on the team’s profile. However, we still had to try.

Out of all of us, Rossi was the best negotiator. Hell, he wrote the interrogation and negotiation how-to books for the FBI. In the Academy, we studied his tactics, and we studied his reports. If anyone could get through to the deputy, our best shot was Rossi. We all knew it.

“Don’t do it,” Rossi shook his head. I adjusted my grip on my gun as the deputy wavered. “You’re a cop. You know how this is going to go down unless you drop the gun.”

“I’ll take my chances,” the deputy spat.

“You’re standing in the middle of the FBI… What chances do you have?”

“You think that I’m afraid of the FBI?”

“No,” Rossi shook his head. “You’re afraid of being forgotten, and afraid of being remembered as the villain. You want to be the hero; I know you do. But if you kill that man there, you won’t be the hero. If you kill him, you’ll be locked away and forgotten. It’s your choice. You write the ending. You decide if you’re the hero or villain tonight.”

The deputy chuckled. “They told me you guys were the best minds in the FBI; But that’s the best you have? Pathetic.”

Hotch looked over at me, then to the door over my shoulder, before looking back at me. I raised a brow, wondering what he was thinking. His eyes shifted to my other shoulder, almost like he was telling me to move that way, away from the doors. I took the hint and slowly started backing up. The deputy took notice of my retreat, but he still didn’t make a move or say anything about it.

The thing I knew, a gunshot rang. The glass doors to the BAU shattered as a bullet penetrated them and fired right into the deputy’s head. Since he had been caught off guard by the shot to the back of his head, he didn’t have a chance to press his finger down on the trigger. As his body fell to the ground, his gun flew over by my feet. I quickly knelt down, picked up the weapon, and tucked it in the back of my pants waistband for safe keeping.

JJ stepped in through the doorway of broken glass. Her hands were shaking as she holstered her weapon, the same one she used to shoot the deputy in the back of the head. Everyone started slowly getting up off the floor while Hotch and Rossi moved in. We knew that there was no chance that the deputy was alive, but we all wanted to see it with our own eyes. This was the guy who killed our Penelope Garcia, after all. We needed the reassurance that he was really gone.

“You okay?” I asked JJ, holstering my own weapon, too. She nodded shortly, still staring down at the body. “You sure?” She nodded again, but this time more vaguely, like she was unsure of her answer. “You did good.” I patted her shoulder.

“It’s what he gets for shooting Penelope…” she whispered under her breath. “No one hurts the people we love and gets away with it.”

I nodded and looked over at Hotch. He was staring at me while talking to Rossi. My forehead creased slightly as my eyes softened into a pout. His did the same for the slightest moment. “I love you,” I mouthed to him.

“I love you, too,” he mouthed back when no one was looking.


	24. PROSECUTORS IN ANOTHER LIFE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Name calling. Brat taming. Bondage (tied back with a neck tie). Fingering. Choking. (Slight breath play?). Talk of kidnapping and murder-- everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 3 Episode 19. Two months after part twenty-three.

Hotch was standing at the window in his office, his hands buried in his pockets. His face was flat with a natural frown, his eyes scanning the bullpen, not looking for anything specific. When I noticed that his gaze was lingering on me from time to time a little too long, I leaned back in my chair, bit the back of my pen, and stared back with a smirk. I thought that the challenge would earn me a smile or at least a beckoning finger to lure me to his office, but he didn’t budge. He continued to watch the BAU move and work around him while he was lost in thought.

Something was wrong. The fact that he didn’t even pretend to not see me by going to sit down at his desk to distract himself told me that he really wasn’t paying attention and that his mind was elsewhere. It could have been related to whatever just happened on the phone call he was on only a few minutes ago. Or maybe it had to do with the way I kind of blue balled him that morning. He had woken up a little handsy, and I tried to play along before we realized that we were running late, and I made the call to wait until after work. Whatever was going on, it had him in a twist.

Finally, after a few minutes of me watching him, he finally gave in and exited his office. He walked down into the bullpen, waiting a moment to make his presence known while he just listened to the shenanigans the team had going on. As usual, Morgan was giving Reid a rough time, which was earning a laugh from the entire office. Garcia had brought in a photo she found of Emily in high school, which then turned into finding old pictures of Reid. Of course, Reid was a huge dork, and it was the perfect ammunition for Morgan to poke fun at him.

When Hotch cleared his throat, though, everyone stopped and turned. Just as I had noticed something was wrong, so too did the rest of the team. So when Morgan asked what was wrong, Hotch shuffled on the balls of his feet awkwardly and answered, “Brian Matloff woke up.”

Reid and Morgan exchanged a glance.

“What are you talking about, Hotch?” Morgan asked.

“I’m about to go to the hospital, but I got the call a few minutes ago.”

“It’s been four years.”

“I know.”

“Anyone care to explain to the class?” Emily spoke up, injecting herself into the conversation because the rest of us were in dire need of context.

“Brian Matloff, the Blue Ridge Strangler,” Reid clarified for us. “Hotch, Morgan, and I worked his case about four years back.”

“We nearly had him, too, but the son of a bitch leapt off a building,” Morgan hissed through his teeth.

It was clearly still a sore topic for Hotch and Morgan, though Reid seemed mostly unbothered. But that was what had Hotch all upset and broody in his office. Morgan didn’t like letting criminals get away, and if they died, he felt like that was worse than letting them go. As for Hotch, it sounded like the case was something that he had a lot of problems with after the fact. Maybe he was scrutinized for how the case ended, or maybe he was also upset that Matloff got out of it without serving his time. Either way, neither of them seemed to be over it, even though it had been four years.

“He killed three victims in the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Hotch gave more explanation since Morgan was letting his anger cloud his thoughts and conversational skills.

“Well, allegedly,” Reid said. “He was never convicted because after he jumped off that building, he went into a coma.”

“Yeah, well, he’s awake now,” Hotch scoffed, crossing his arms. “And he’s finally going to be tried. They want the three of us to testify. I’m headed down to the hospital now to talk with the prosecutor, Cece Hillenbrand, and we’ll discuss where we’ll go from here.”

“You want backup?” Morgan asked.

Hotch shook his head. “I’ll let you guys know everything once I’m done.” He buried his hands in his pockets as he returned to his office to grab his things then head out.

We all looked at each other blankly. The information Hotch just dropped on us hadn’t yet settled, and confusion was still hanging in the air. I could tell that Morgan was pissed, and Reid was simple mind-boggled. Emily and I still didn’t have all the pieces, which left our confusion in a separate category from the rest of them. We weren’t around when this Blue Ridge Strangler case was ongoing, and I hadn’t even heard of it before. Hotch probably forgot about it altogether until he got that call. It didn’t surprise me that it hadn’t come up before, but the shock of it still hit me with the same force that it clearly hit Hotch, Morgan, and Reid.

When Hotch left his office with his briefcase, we all watched him. Morgan looked anxious, like he wanted to go with Hotch, that the offer he made for backup was less of an offer and more of a “let’s go” statement that Hotch turned down. Then, when he was gone, I expected the office to go back to work, but no one moved. We didn’t even turn back to our paperwork. It was quiet. Telephones rang, keyboards clacked, Anderson was running around and asking for lunch orders. Yet no one moved or said anything. It was such an odd thing to think about. Usually, when we took down Unsubs, one of two things would happen: we would take them in and they’d serve their time, or for one reason or another, they’d die. We never, ever had an instance before like this where an Unsub would wake up years afterwards. What were we supposed to do? How were we supposed to respond?

“Four years…” Morgan mumbled, throwing his pen on his desk. “Four years that asshole is out of it, and then he just… wakes up.”

“It’s a miracle he even woke up,” Reid said, still dumbfounded. I had never seen him so baffled in my life. Reid always had something to say, but not this time. Finally.

Truth be told, though, it didn’t feel like a miracle. Matloff waking up when things were finally getting better after Garcia got shot seemed like a big “fuck you” from the universe. At some point we deserved a break, right? I mean, Hotch, of all people, deserved a break. He had been working tirelessly for years, and it seemed like since our brief suspensions, he was working even harder. I just wanted him to stop. I wanted him to slow down, to look at life, to look at our family, and appreciate what we had. Matloff waking up was just going to prolong that attempt… It was exhausting.

* * *

About an hour later, we were all still sitting around silently. Reid managed to get back to his work, but he was slow, which was odd. Emily was trying to fit all the pieces together of what was happening and what was about to happen, meanwhile Morgan and I were still just… there. When my phone started ringing, the whole office jumped. Even Anderson jumped in his own skin. Hotch was calling me already. Hopefully, it was good news that I could share with the office to ease everyone’s conscience.

“Greenaway,” I answered.

“We’ve got a problem,” Hotch said in a breathless panic. “Matloff had amnesia.” My eyes widened and I spun around in my chair to look at Morgan. He glanced up at me, catching my worry, and in return grew confused. “Dave’s coming down to help us rebuild the case, but our key witness died of an overdose two years ago, and the prosecution still wants me to testify, but not Morgan or Reid, and I—”

“Hotch,” I caught his attention after he started rambling. “It’s going to be okay. What do you need?”

“Approach it like it’s any case? Go through everything. Victimology, M.O., find the evidence, build the profile, do everything you can to help us put this guy away.”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “I’ll get the team on it right away.”

“Thank you. I love you.”

I looked around the bullpen to see that everyone was watching me, waiting eagerly for answers. I couldn’t say it back while they were all watching. As much as I wanted to, Hotch and I had our rules for a reason, and even something as simple as “I love you” just wasn’t appropriate in front of the team. At least not yet. Considering how comfortable the two of us were getting around each other at the office, it almost felt like saying “I love you” while around our co-workers wasn’t a big deal. But that was a conversation for another time, I supposed. So all I said back to Hotch was, “I’ll see you when you get back.” And then, without saying anything else, I had to hang up on him. One of these days I was going to say it back to him while around our friends, and I wasn’t going to be afraid to do it. Hopefully that time was soon.

“What was that about?” Morgan asked.

“We need to start building a case against Matloff,” I answered, standing from my seat. Everyone got up from their desks and followed me to the roundtable. “Matloff supposedly has amnesia. He doesn’t remember the murders.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Morgan scoffed.

I shook my head. “JJ, do you think that you and Garcia can get the case files for us?”

“Sure,” she accepted, leaving through the back door to head to Garcia’s office.

“Hotch wants us to build the case up from the ground,” I told the remaining members of the team in the room. Morgan, Reid, and Emily all sighed. It was going to be a very long day. “Hotch and Rossi should be calling back with more information once they have it.”

JJ and Garcia returned with copies of the Matloff case files for each of us. They handed them out then took a seat with us at the table. We had to start with victimology, like always. Three women were found murdered and buried in Blue Ridge Parkway. They were all found buried next to each other in shallow, two-foot deep graves. The soil over the bodies was fairly new when they were found, which referenced that the Unsub was going back again and again to revisit the bodies. The victims themselves were slim, beautiful, brunette, brown eyed women. They had all been out for jogs on the pathway when they went missing. Victimology wise, he went for women who attracted him sexually, and he always went for them when they were alone and least expecting it. He took them, strangled them, and buried them deep in the forest where he thought no one would find them.

Based on such information, we could determine the simple: he visited the part enough to know it like the back of his hand. A park ranger would have that knowledge. He liked to revisit the scenes, which made it sexually motivated. He had a ruse and a plan in order to take his victims, which made him intelligent and organized. All of which pointed directly to Brian Matloff.

The best part was, with the third victim, Darci Corbet, there was a witness who could put Brian Matloff at the scene. While that sounded like that would suddenly make this an open and shut case, the downside was that Marvin Leopold, the witness on the trail that morning, died two years ago of an overdose. So the fact of the matter was this: there was no physical evidence connecting Matloff to the crimes, no one to put him at the scenes, and our Unsub had amnesia. Plain and simple, we were fucked.

Hotch wanted us to rebuild the profile, but… no matter how we looked at it, it pointed to Matloff. That was the unfortunate part of looking at the case after they had caught the guy. We were biased, and our profile was always going to be tweaked to point fingers at Matloff. Emily, JJ, and I were supposed to be the most impartial at that table, yet the three of us kept coming up with the same profile they built four years ago. Great. That wasn’t exactly helpful. How were we supposed to find another way to tie this to Matloff when our tunnel vision was blinding us from seeing outside the box? I almost wished that Hotch hadn’t told us about Matloff first. Maybe this would have been easier.

“What about this?” Emily asked, pointing to something in her file before turning it around for all of us to see. She had spotted something about Matloff’s fascination of Native American Culture, and she was curious how that helped the profile back then.

“Matloff was obsessed with the Native American belief that burying a body face down traps the soul of the person and prevents them from haunting the killer,” Reid explained. “Tying together his interest with the mythology, we were able to hone in on his M.O.”

“What caught his eye about that?” JJ asked. “I mean, he grew up Catholic in the city. How would he have grown into the obsession?”

Morgan shrugged. “We didn’t get that far.”

“What about the jewelry he took as souvenirs? Does that have anything to do with the mythology?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Reid said, shaking his head. “We don’t even know what he did with them. We were hoping that he kept them at his apartment so that we could have physical evidence tying him to the crime, but we never found anything.”

My phone buzzed with a text suddenly. I turned it over on the table to light up the screen and get a look. Hotch had texted to say: “Judge wants to meet this afternoon with how to proceed.” I looked up at the team as they were still chatting about what to do, and an idea hit me. I picked my phone up and texted Hotch back. “Psych eval.” It took him a few minutes to respond, which was why I was shocked when all it read was: “Thanks. Love you.” That meant that they were either going to do it, or Hotch was completely ignoring me. I wasn’t sure which. Then, my phone buzzed again. “Can you and JJ go to the hospital to learn more about Matloff’s amnesia and his stay there over the past four years?” I rolled my eyes. I texted back a reluctant: “Sure. Love you.”, then buried my phone in my pocket.

I looked at JJ and nodded towards the door. We gathered our things after she caught my hint. On our way out to the car, I told JJ what we were doing. The plan was to head to Matloff’s hospital, talk to the doctors, find out what we could about him over the past four years. It wasn’t much to go on, but we were going to do what we could.

At the hospital, JJ and I navigated our way to the wing where Matloff had been kept for the past four years. People were hurrying around us, monitors were beeping, doctors were shouting for help, and the elevator was dinging with every floor it passed, but JJ and I stayed to ourselves. We walked quietly and calmly, making our way there without bothering anyone. We knew what we were there for, we knew how to get the information, and we knew where to get it. There was no point running around like headless chicken like every other time I had been to the hospital over the past year.

When we reached the front desk of the wing that we needed to visit, JJ asked for the doctor that was overseeing Matloff’s case. We waited a few minutes while the nurse went off to find him, tell him what was going on, and bring him back over to us in the waiting area. After we spotted him coming down the hallway, storming his way over to us, JJ and I fixed our postures for the questioning that would ensue.

“What can I do for you agents?” the doctor asked hurriedly. He obviously had other places to be, but when the FBI comes asking for you, that usually trumps everything else.

“We just have a few questions for you about Brian Matloff,” JJ answered.

“What can you tell us about his amnesia?” I asked

The doctor chuckled. “The simple way or the complicated way?”

“Try us,” I squinted at him lightly.

“The patient has Focal Retrograde Amnesia, meaning he doesn’t remember anything from before he woke up this morning. His name, his birthday, his address, that’s all wiped from his memory. His intelligence remains the same, and his ability to form new memories is still intact, but I’m afraid he won’t be much use to you in court.”

“What about his stay here?” JJ asked. “Was there any sign that he’d wake up different, or was he a unique patient in any way?”

The doctor shook his head. “After about two weeks, you always tend to forget about the coma patients unless it’s a check up that you’re assigned to.”

“What about visitors?” I inquired, crossing my arms. I mean, it wasn’t prison. Anyone could come in and visit Matloff. It seemed like at the time of the investigation, he was a pretty “popular” murderer, and there was a fad around obsessing over psychopaths. Someone could have come to visit him. Right?

“Yeah,” the doctor nodded, “he had a visitor every day.”

“Every day?” I scoffed.

“Do you have a visitor log?” JJ asked.

“I’ll grab it for you guys.” He walked over to the desk to look for the log.

I turned to JJ. “Every day for four years?” I inquired. “You only do that if you’re in love or family.”

“So we’re looking for an admirer or someone he’s related to? But I thought his parents disowned him and he doesn’t have any siblings.”

I glanced over my shoulder to see that the doctor was returning with the visitor’s log. “Then we’re either dealing with a crazy fan or…”

“Her name’s Nina Moore,” he told us while handing it over to JJ.

“What does she look like?” I asked.

The doctor shrugged lightly. “Um… I mean… She had dark hair, she was short…”

“Was she white?”

“No. She looked Hispanic or Mediterranean.”

A thought struck me. “Native American?”

The doctor furrowed his brows before nodding vaguely. “Sure.”

JJ gave me a short, acknowledging nod before I stepped to the side to call Hotch. We never knew why Matloff liked Native American culture and mythology so much, but if he was in any way related to this Nina Moore, and if she really was of Native American descent, it made sense. If it could help the case, which it probably could, then we needed to find Nina Moore as soon as possible. Hotch needed to know first.

“Hotch,” I said into the phone when he picked up. “JJ and I found something at the hospital.” There was silence on the other end, but I could tell that he was listening. “There was a woman who visited Matloff every day. Her name’s Nina Moore, and the doctor said that she’s possibly Native American.”

“That’s great. Have JJ call Garcia to find out if you can find her. Cece and I just got to the office with Matloff. We’re about to start his psych eval, if you want to come in.”

I paused. “The judge approved the eval?”

Hotch hummed a, “Yes.”

“You… you motioned for it after I mentioned it?”

“Of course I did.”

I let my eyes fall shut as relief washed over me. He listened. He trusted me. I was so worried that I had stepped on his toes by offering up the idea of the psych eval. After how he responded to that text, I thought that he wasn’t going to listen to me, but he did. I had nothing to worry about. I knew Hotch trusted me, I should’ve known that he would listen. I almost felt stupid.

“I’ll be there as soon as JJ drops me off,” I told him.

“Okay,” he sighed. I could tell how tired he was already. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” It finally felt good to say it back after I was barred from doing it earlier in front of everyone in the bullpen.

When the line went dead, I put my phone away and told JJ that we needed to go. In the car, JJ called Garcia, as planned, to ask her to look for a Nina Moore. The idea was that Garcia would get us some information before we’d get back to the office, which meant that JJ could immediately leave to go seek out a new lead connecting to Nina. Thankfully, Garcia, the goddess she is, got us the information before we even pulled into the parking lot. She called back to let us know that Nina’s last name used to be Genesee. Through her wonderful talent of hacking, she was able to find out that Nina had a baby thirty-seven years ago, around the time Matloff was born, and gave her son up for adoption. When I asked if she had any Native American roots, Garcia chuckled before telling me, “Oh, yeah. She’s obsessed with it.” That was everything we needed.

So when we got to the office, JJ switched to take the driver’s seat, and I headed inside. On my way to the interrogation room down the hall to the left, I could see that Morgan, Reid, Rossi, and Emily were all in the boardroom, sitting around the roundtable, working on putting more of the case and profile together. They were all so nose deep in work that they hadn’t noticed my arrival at Quantico, even after I backpedaled to put my purse under my desk, then headed back out into the hallway.

In the mirror room connected to the interrogation room, I ran into Hotch and a woman with him. Hotch smiled lightly at me when he saw that it was me. The woman in the room didn’t acknowledge me yet, though.

“Y/N, this is Cece Hillenbrand,” Hotch said, pointing to the blonde woman next to him. “Cece, this is Agent Greenaway.” We shook hands and greeted each other with a smile.

“How’s it going in there?” I asked.

“Well, we already performed the eval once, yet nothing happened.”

“He passed?”

Hotch nodded. “I don’t know how.”

“Maybe he really doesn’t remember.”

“It’s possible. I want to run the test again, though.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “However, I want to do something different this time. I don’t like sending you in there with Unsubs who see you as their type, but…” Hotch hesitated while biting the nail on his thumb. “I think that if you sit in there with Matloff while they do the test again, it might…” He sighed and crossed his arms again. “It might arouse him enough that we might be able to get something out of him. But I won’t send you in there unless you—”

“I’ll do it, Hotch.” I stepped to the right and grabbed the handle of the door. “I’ll be fine.” I turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped into the room. As I entered, Matloff craned his neck to look at me. “Hello, Mr. Matloff, I’m Agent Greenaway. I’m going to sit in with you while we run the test again. Is that alright?”

Matloff silently nodded.

I took the seat across from him, just beside the monitor that was set up to show him the crime scene images of his victims. I nodded to the mirror window, a signal for them to start the test again. Just as I heard the slideshow buzz awake, I returned my stare to Matloff. He was watching the monitor intently, but I took note of how his eyes didn’t dilate, and his body didn’t move. Most Unsubs, even if they were trying to hide sexual attraction to their crimes, had an involuntary reaction to shift about uncomfortably. Usually, that had to do with trying to ignore any arousal so that their attraction wasn’t obvious. But not Matloff. He didn’t move a muscle. In fact, his face contorted slightly to show disgust and disapproval towards what he did to his victims. Most obvious, however, was that he didn’t look at me once.

When it was over, Matloff sighed, blinking his eyes dramatically as he looked away from the screen like he was trying to forget what he saw. I squinted at him slightly, trying to put together a profile in my mind. Either he was very good at hiding that he knew about the murders or he genuinely had no idea. My guess was the latter, unfortunately. And when the doctor came in, Matloff didn’t look at her, either, though she was also his type. Something just wasn’t fitting. The profile that the team built up four years ago, and the one we were recreating now wasn’t adding up. Something about Matloff was off.

I stood from my seat with the intent of leaving the room while the doctor detached him from all the different computers he was hooked up to. As I made my way around the table, reaching for the door, Matloff grabbed my arm. I seized up, looking down at him before thinking about trying to pull away. He glanced up at me, both of us ignoring how Hotch burst the door open to get between us. Matloff didn’t let go of me as Hotch tried to pry us apart, though.

“Do I know you?” he asked me. I furrowed my brows. “I mean, did we meet before, when I was still… you know…”

I snatched my arm away from him. “No. We’ve never met.”

Hotch kept his eyes glued to Matloff as I pushed past him in a hurry to leave the room. I didn’t care that he touched me or asked if we had met before, but what irked me was how he didn’t look at me once until I was leaving… and he didn’t appear enthralled at all. He seemed impartial. Interesting, considering his past. Perhaps he really didn’t remember what he did or who he was.

“So?” Hotch asked, closing the door behind us.

I shook my head. “Nothing. He didn’t flinch once. He didn’t even react positively. He seemed disgusted, Hotch. He didn’t look at me, he didn’t move, he didn’t smirk, his eyes didn’t even search the photos. He probably passed the test again.”

Hotch sighed in defeat. “Shit.”

“What does that mean?” Cece asked.

“It means that he really doesn’t remember—” Hotch began.

“Or you got the wrong guy,” I finished.

Cece’s arms fell to her sides for a moment as she came to terms with what she said. Either way, her case was going to fall apart in court very fast. The psych eval wasn’t admissible in court, which was the good news. We didn’t have to use it, but the defense would likely use the results of the eval to push their agenda that Matloff wasn’t involved in the first place.

“It’s been a long day,” Hotch finally spoke up after looking at the time. It was already past four. “We should call it so that we’re well rested for court tomorrow.”

Cece chuckled. She knew that she wasn’t getting sleep, and I knew that Hotch, Morgan, and Reid weren’t going to sleep, either. Even if he sent everyone home, it wouldn’t matter. This was going to eat at them until Matloff was behind bars for good. To my surprise, though, Cece “agreed” to Hotch’s idea. She grabbed her purse from the table behind her, wished us a goodnight, then left. Hotch and I turned back to face the interrogation room where they were getting ready to move Matloff out and take him back to jail.

“You okay?” I asked him, lifting my hand to run my fingers through his hair on the side of his head.

“I will be. At home.”

I nodded agreeingly before reaching back down to take his hand. “Let’s go home, then.”

When we left the mirror room, we stopped holding hands. We made our way back into the BAU so that Hotch could dismiss everyone officially, though they would all probably stay, anyhow. I grabbed my purse from under my desk, and Hotch grabbed his briefcase from his office up the ramp. Everyone wished us a good night as we hurried out.

Nothing was said between us on the way home. The radio was running and Hotch had his hand on my thigh, but we didn’t say anything. I could sense that he just needed quiet for a bit so that he could think. I was willing to do that. Honestly, I needed to think, too. Everything we learned all day was starting to come together in my head. Between finding out that Matloff had amnesia, that someone had gone to visit him every day, then he passed the psych eval, it seemed like the world just kept smacking Hotch in the face.

Hotch pulled into the driveway quietly. As he turned off the ignition, he sighed and slumped back against his seat. I unbuckled myself and turned to look at him. He looked exhausted and defeated, and, honestly, I couldn’t blame him. The day started off well. We got to work, we were happy, things were good. And then he got that call. Brian Matloff woke up and our day went down the drain. We were so busy running around, trying to rebuild a four year old case, and it had entirely worn him out. I didn’t envy him. Tomorrow, it was possible that he would have to testify, or at least start preparing to do so. Not only was our day long, but the next few were going to be hell, too. And all of it rested on Hotch’s shoulders.

“I’ll call in a pizza,” I offered quietly, trying not to disturb the peace he found in the car. He nodded. “Cinnamon knots, too?” He smiled and nodded. “Okay. Come on, Sleeping Beauty.”

We got out of the car slowly and lazily. While we made our way inside the house, I dug out my phone to place the pizza order. Hotch unlocked the door and turned off the alarm. We both fell onto the couch as I dialed the pizza place and waited for them to pick up. Before I could do anything, Hotch trapped me in his arms and pulled me towards him so that I was laying on my side, my back pressed against his chest as we cuddled. I kissed his forearms that were holding my chest to make sure I couldn’t escape. Then the line picked up and I started ordering. Hotch nuzzled his nose into the back of my neck, his breath hot against my skin, making me shiver and smile. I was trying to focus on getting the order right, but all I could think about was how much I loved him and how he never failed to make me swoon with even the smallest gestures like this. He was too precious, too pure to let the world ruin him like it was. This Matloff nonsense was ridiculous. He didn’t deserve it. I was just glad that I could be there to comfort him, and that I had the strength and energy to order a damn pizza when he clearly didn’t.

When I hung up after getting the order in, I put my phone on the coffee table in front of me, then turned over to face Hotch. His eyes were shut peacefully, and he was breathing calmly. He looked so untroubled for once. It didn’t look like the world had just dragged him through the mud all day. And when I brushed a hand through his long hair, he smiled. I kissed his nose gently then closed my eyes as we both hugged each other close. I loved him. So fucking much. The little moments like this always reminded me why all the shit in our lives was still worth it, that there was always a reason to keep fighting. If we didn’t have the shit moments and days, then we wouldn’t have these little moments like this, and what was the point then?

I kissed his cheek before my whole body went limp. I loved him. More than anything. The world didn’t deserve him. I didn’t deserve him.

“You okay?” he asked me softly. Both of our eyes were still shut, but I knew that he could still somehow see that my mind was racing. “I’m sorry I let things get out of hand at Matloff’s eval today.”

I shook my head slightly. “I haven’t even thought about it.”

“Then, what?”

“Sh…” I begged, squeezing him slightly. I just wanted to enjoy the silence a little longer. We could talk while eating. “I love you.”

Hotch kissed me tenderly. It was one of those light kisses that reminded me that he was there and that he loved me, but it wasn’t passionate or hard enough to rile us up. We just wanted to be lazy for a bit. That didn’t make us bad people. I think we had a tendency to forget that not everything was about work and sex. I mean, we obviously loved both. But taking a moment to just relax and be us amidst all the craziness in the world didn’t make us horrible people. In fact, it made us human.

Then the damn doorbell rang. I sighed as I tried to sit up to answer it, but Hotch was being stubborn. He was holding onto me for dear life despite acting like he was asleep. I pecked his cheek a thousand times, earning a wide smile and giggle from him. While he was distracted, I pried his arms off me and hurried over to the door. I grabbed my wallet from my purse next to the door, then paid for the pizza. By the time I turned back towards the living room with the food in hand and the door closed behind me, Hotch was actually sitting up on the couch.

When I tried to just set the box on the table so that I could go get plates and napkins, Hotch wrapped his arms around my waist again, and he pulled me onto his lap. To get back at me for my ticking kisses earlier, Hotch started attacking my neck with his lips. I bit back a laugh. I was trying to protest by standing up, but Hotch held me steady on him, so I finally gave up and turned my face to kiss him. He was caught off guard when I did it. I took the chance to carefully push him back against the couch while we kissed passionately and held each other. I swear, it was worth the sore and chapped lips. Always.

Hotch finally, after we were both breathless, let me pull away. I shifted around on his lap innocently, avoiding any contact that could be viewed as otherwise. I leaned forward and moved the small box of cinnamon knots so that we could get to the pizza underneath. Hotch still wasn’t letting me go to get plates or napkins. Asshole. So that meant things were going to get gross very fast unless he finally gave in. When I offered Hotch a slice, I think that was when he suddenly realized his mistake, because he immediately let me go, and even gently slapped the outside of my thigh to push me towards the kitchen. I glared at him over my shoulder. He smirked and winged his arms over the couch. He was absolutely impossible sometimes. Not jumping his bones every chance I could get felt like a challenge all the time, and he fucking new it.

Finally, when we had plates and napkins, and Hotch pulled me back onto his lap, we started eating. I was sitting on his thighs, my right shoulder facing him and my left shoulder facing the pizza on the table. As we ate, I was watching him out the corner of my eye. He still looked exhausted, but the food was giving him enough energy to keep sitting upright and not suddenly topple over.

“What do you remember about the case?” I asked him. That was what had been on my mind earlier, but I didn’t want to talk about it while we were relaxing. I also knew that I’d drop the topic the second we were done eating. “I mean, besides the facts. How did you feel? What stuck out to you the most? Would it really be so bad if Matloff doesn’t remember and he’s released? Just… what are you thinking?”

Hotch sighed quietly as he chewed on the bite he just took. “You really want to do this right now?”

I nodded. He was going to have to testify eventually, and it was probably better if he sorted all of his thoughts and feelings out beforehand. On the stand, he would have to be cool and collected. He couldn’t show any emotion because our jobs required us to push emotion aside for the sake of getting the truth. He needed to maintain that facade in court. However, if he didn’t discuss it all beforehand, I knew him well enough to know that he could get wound up if there was something on his mind. He could talk to me. Always. No matter what he was feeling or thinking about this, he could tell me.

“It was the first case I ever worked on with Reid. He was new, and he was still trying to prove himself—”

“Reid? Proving himself? Doesn’t sound like him,” I said sarcastically with a smirk.

Hotch pinched my thigh lightly to get me to be quiet. “Morgan and I weren’t close yet, but we respected each other. Our team just wasn’t what it is now. We weren’t…” He hesitated. I wanted him to say it. He could admit it. It wouldn’t kill him to say that we were a family. “We were just different,” he said, opting out of the truth. I tried to hide my slight disappointment. “I remember that the three of us felt bad for the victims, and we were desperate to find answers for them. I even… Honestly, I even felt bad for Matloff when he fell off that building, but that doesn’t excuse what he did. He did kill those girls, I know it, and there are definitely more bodies out there that we couldn’t find. Matloff’s playing a game, I can tell. I think that he’s smart, calculating, and vain. I feel like we shouldn’t let him get away with this, no matter what the eval said.”

“Do you think he’ll kill again if he’s found innocent?”

Hotch nodded and took another bite of his pizza.

* * *

As we pulled up to the courthouse, Hotch and I took notice of the media crowd that had gathered on the steps outside. Every major news channel had a van there with a reporter and a camera following everyone who was just trying to get inside. Poor Cece, Hotch’s lawyer friend, was caught in the middle of it while still trying to push through. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that same adventure just to get into the courthouse for a few hours’ worth of the trial. It was only the first day of Matloff’s trial, which meant that it would be about an hour or so of excusing juror members, then both the prosecution and defense teams would get up in front of the jury to make their opening statements. If we happened to get to witnesses, it would be an absolute miracle. Considering the media frenzy surrounding this case, it was going to take forever just to find suitable juror members, and then to get through the opening statements? What a mess.

Hotch started getting out of the car, but I stopped him by grabbing his hand. I was still staring at all of the reporters on the opposite side of the parking lot, which must have tipped off Hotch about why I stopped him, because he settled back in his seat and kissed my knuckles. My breath sputtered as I tried to calm down against his touch, but I was still nervous about it. The media wasn’t exactly my thing. In our line of work, I liked staying back to do the behind the scenes work. That one time in St. Louis, during the Mill Creek Killer case, that was different, because Gideon and JJ practically forced me to be up there during the media meeting just to lure in the Hollow Man. But this… They knew who Hotch was, and therefore they probably knew who I was. It didn’t take a genius like Reid to figure out that mine and Hotch’s careers were nearly destroyed because of our relationship. Reporters were vultures, and I was sure that they already knew that they were dating, and that was somehow going to be made relevant on the nine o’clock news. Assholes.

He kissed my knuckles again. “Just hold onto me and stay close, okay?” I nodded. “They’re going to try to ask you questions, and they’re going to try to get under your skin in order to get a reaction. Don’t give them the satisfaction, alright?” I nodded again. “Come on,” he invited lightly, tugging at my hand.

We separated for a moment so that we could get out of the car. I raced around to the front where he was waiting for me, holding out his hand, and smiling at me. I took his hand and hugged my side close to his. Before we started towards the stairs, Hotch locked the car. When we were all sorted, Hotch started leading me forwards, though I was reluctant. It was so weird that I wasn’t afraid of sitting in the room with psychopaths like Matloff, yet I couldn’t face a crowd of reporters. That said something about me, didn’t it?

The closer we got, the more reporters started to take notice of our approach. It started with just one, but once they told their camera man to turn around, everyone else took their lead. Hotch and I were immediately surrounded before we even made it onto the steps. He got ahead of me slightly, making sure that his hold on my hand was still there and that I was still pressed against his side. He put his arm out, trying to push through all the microphones and cameras so that I wouldn’t have to. I kept my head low, focusing my gaze on my feet and trying not to trip on Hotch as we shuffled up towards the courthouse. Reporters were screaming in my ear still, though. They were all shouting questions, and cameras were flashing in my eyes, and microphones were bumping into the back of my head. At one point, I thought I heard someone mention Jack. I tried to stop to see who said it, but Hotch kept pulling me along.

When we finally got inside, I sighed with relief, and tripped into Hotch’s shoulder. He caught me and asked, “You alright?”

I giggled and nodded. “Yeah. There’s a reason why JJ always deals with the media and I’m not jealous of her.”

Hotch chuckled. “Fair enough.”

“Thank god you’re here,” Cece cheered, approaching us in a hurry. “Are you ready? We’re starting in a few minutes.”

Hotch nodded, and I followed his lead into the courtroom. The audience seats in the back of the room were surprisingly full. Reid was already sitting down towards the front with two empty seats beside him. It almost looked like he saved them for us. I smiled lightly as we headed over to him and Hotch jokingly asked him if those seats were taken after we startled him somewhat. Reid fixed his hair and gestured for us to sit down.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence, listening to the room talk in whispers, the jury was called in. Everyone fell silent as we watched them file into their seats. When they were done, we were asked to stand for the judge. Hotch slyly took my hand as we stood up. Afterwards, when the judge was seated, he told us to sit, and the prosecution and defense teams started taking their turns asking the jury questions to see who should be excused. By some miracle, time flew by, and not a single member was dismissed. So the opening statements began. Cece stood to go first.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you’re here today to bring justice to the families of the three beautiful, young women who lost their lives four years ago to a cold blooded, calculating killer. Darci Corbet, Celeste Ferami, April Sotherford. Three women out for a run on the Blue Ridge Parkway trail when they were approached by a park ranger. An employee who abused his authority to lure these women into a secluded area where he could safely perform the act of murder. He strangled them slowly, inflicting maximum suffering and terror, ensuring that he would gain the most pleasure from the kill. He buried them in shallow graves, leaving them turned upside down in the most demeaning position. And then he thought he got away with it. But he didn’t. We caught him. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is your civil duty to finally bring justice for his three victims. It’s your duty to put this man away once and for all so that he can not hurt anyone else. Thank you for being here, for helping to put an end to this monster’s insanity.”

Cece turned away from the jury to return to her seat. When she sat down, I felt Hotch give my hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Counselor, would the defense like to make its opening statement now or wait ‘til the prosecution rests?” the judge asked.

The defense lawyer stood. “We would like to give our opening statement now, Your Honor.”

“You may begin.”

The lawyer stepped around the table to approach the jury. “Was the murder of the three women found dead in Blue Ridge Parkway a result of the act of murder? Perhaps. Ladies and gentlemen, over the next few days or so, you’re going to be told that my client was responsible for these horrendous deaths, but this is nothing but a theory. There is no eyewitness, no fingerprints, no DNA, no physical evidence tying my client to any of these crimes. None. Not even a murder weapon. Not one shred of hard evidence.”

I squeezed Hotch’s hand. This was what we feared most. We tried and tried to get something, to find new evidence, but there was nothing. Of course the defense was going to base their argument around that. It was the obvious out. But Cece was still going to fight like hell, and Hotch wasn’t going to let Matloff get away with it. We still had time to find something. JJ was still looking for Nina Moore, which meant that we could possibly have a new lead soon.

“The only way that they can tie my client to these crimes is through the pseudo-science called profiling. That’s not evidence, ladies and gentlemen. That’s grasping at straws to put an innocent man away in prison. All I ask of you, the jury, is to keep an open mind over the next few days. Recognize that there are people rushing to close this case, and they will pin it on my innocent client if they must. That is all.”

“Thank you, Counselor,” the judge said. “Prosecution, you may call your first witness.”

“The prosecution would like to call Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner to the stand,” Cece said to the court.

I looked over at Hotch. I didn’t think we’d get to witnesses yet— and I especially didn’t anticipate that Hotch was already going to testify. I thought we had a little more time. He told me that he was prepared for it, but I was still caught off guard by it. It was as though he expected it, however, because Hotch untangled our fingers, and he stood to walk up to the stand.

After being sworn in, Hotch took a seat, adjusted his suit, cleared his throat, and looked up at Cece to signal that she could begin questioning him. Cece stepped around the table she had been sitting at and neared the center of the court.

“Agent Hotchner, could you please state your full name and title for the court?” Cece began her questioning, going easy so that Hotch could get comfortable up there first.

“Aaron Hotchner. I’m a Supervisory Special Agent for the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI in Quantico.”

“And what does the Behavioral Analysis Unit do, Agent?”

“We took at the psychological aspect of suspects in order to catch them. We look at behavior, victimology, the suspect’s Modus Operandi, and linkage analysis.”

“What is linkage analysis?”

“It’s the process in which my team and I attempt to link all of the behaviors between crime scenes in order to prove that one person is responsible, and from there we can determine who is responsible.”

“So, through the process of linkage analysis, you and your team concluded that all three of these murders had been committed by one man.”

Hotch nodded. “Yes, that’s correct.”

“And that man was the defendant, Brian Matloff?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us how you came to that conclusion, Agent Hotchner?”

Hotch looked over at me for a brief moment before answering Cece’s question. “Four years ago, along with Agents Reid and Morgan, we began to analyze the behavior of the unknown subject, which we refer to as the Unsub. We took into account the behaviors that led up to the murders, during the murders, and following at the murders. Through that analysis, we were able to create a profile that allowed us to generate a suspect pool, which we could eventually use to narrow down to one Unsub. By assessing what we knew about the victims, the crime scenes, and the behaviors, we were able to conclude that the Unsub was in a position of power, like being a park ranger at Blue Ridge Parkway. Because of how the bodies were buried, we could tell that he was not only a ranger, but he was going back to the scene to relive the experience to gain gratification of either the sexual or sadistic nature. Once we had concluded that he was a park ranger, all of the evidence began to make sense, which then led us straight to Brian Matloff.”

“Well, how did you come to the direct conclusion that it was the defendant? I imagine that there are thousands of people who work for the park service. How were you able to narrow your suspect pool, as you put it?”

“Our technical analyst, Penelope Garcia, helped us narrow down the search. We knew that his knowledge of the forest was extensive, which meant that he wasn’t recently employed. We also knew that he knew the area and path around the waterfall well enough to know where to hide the bodies so that they wouldn’t be found, which meant that he was mostly stationed in that area. The last thing we checked for was which of the park rangers was injecting themselves into our investigation. Most of the rangers wanted the whole thing to go away, so they went on as normal, but Brian Matloff was constantly hovering and prying for answers that we couldn’t give him.”

“Couldn’t he have just been a concerned worker and citizen?”

“At first, we were also skeptical, but once we delivered our profile to his co-workers, they reassured us that he fit the same behaviors that we were looking for.”

“So, after deciding on the defendant as a lead suspect, what did you and your team do?”

“We decided to go speak with him at his mother’s home, but she told us that he had left earlier with ‘a lady friend’. We tracked him down to a secret apartment he had. We took a SWAT team with us because we were under the impression that he had a hostage or another victim. When we tried to get him to open the door, that was when we realized that he had started climbing through the fire escape. When Agent Morgan pursued him, that was when Matloff jumped.”

“And the woman that was thought to be with him?”

“We never found her… But we believe that he killed her and disposed of her remains somewhere.”

Cece nodded at Hotch before looking to the judge, “No further questions, Your Honor.” Cece walked back to her seat at the prosecution’s table.

“Would the defense like to cross examine the witness?” the judge asked.

The defense attorney stood. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“You may begin.”

“Agent Hotchner, in your report of the night that my client attempted to run away from the police, you called that ‘a strong indicator of his guilt’. Were you aware that he had an outstanding warrant at the time of his arrest?”

“Yes,” Hotch answered.

“So, isn’t it possible that Mr. Matloff fled, not because he was guilty of murder, but because he was guilty of the outstanding warrant?”

“There were eight law enforcement officers in bullet proof vests standing outside his door. I doubt that any reasonable person would—”

“A simple yes or no answer will suffice.”

Hotch bit his bottom lip briefly. He was getting a little worked up, but he was holding it back. “Yes, it’s possible.”

“Right. And you say that it was your team’s profile that led you to my client’s door in the middle of the night—”

“A behavioral analysis profile was a factor in our investigation, yes, but there were more factors involved.”

“Such as?”

Hotch fell short. We still didn’t have any physical evidence, and there weren’t any witnesses tying Matloff to the scene. While there was always more that went into a case than just a dumbed down profile that people would see in a report, it was hard to explain to people outside of the job. Most people didn’t understand what it took to work for the BAU. Being smart and fit was part of it, of course, but being able to put together clues that weren’t really there was sometimes part of it, too. It sounded like what happened with Matloff was a case of putting things together that weren’t tangible, while not thinking the future, like this, through ahead of time. It explained why Hotch was more careful nowadays.

The defense lawyer moved on, realizing that he wasn’t going to get an answer out of Hotch, which only helped prove his case. “These behavioral analysis profiles are what your unit in the FBI does, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You use this formula for every case you work on?”

“Yes.”

“You used this same formula for cases like the Olympic Park Bombings in Atlanta?”

“Yes.”

“And was that suspect that you identified, Richard Jewell, ever convicted of those bombings?”

“Objection,” Cece called from her seat. “Relevance?”

“Goes to the credibility of the witness and his field.”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge nodded.

Hotch’s lip pursed. That hit a nerve, I could tell. “No, he was not convicted.”

“Why was that?” the lawyer asked.

“Because the real suspect, Eric Rudolph, attempted another bombing while Jewell was in custody.”

“So you profiled the wrong man.”

“No. Our profile was dead on; we just had the wrong man.”

The lawyer scoffed. “And how about the Baton Rouge Killer? Your unit said that he was white and living in the city. He was black and from the suburbs. You said that the B.T.K Killer, Dennis Rader, was divorced and impotent. He was married with children. So, Agent Hotchner, was it possible that you profiled the wrong man this time, too?”

Hotch didn’t waver. He answered with his stone-cold glare and said, “No.”

“The truth is,” the lawyer turned to the jury, “behavioral analysis is just intellectual guesswork. You probably couldn’t tell me the color of my socks with any greater accuracy than a carnival psychic.”

I swear, if I weren’t in a court, I would have leapt out at that man and strangled him then and there myself. I knew that it was his job to practically tear down Hotch’s reputation in order to prove his case, but… my blood was boiling. He didn’t have what it took to be a part of the BAU. Hell, he didn’t have what it took to even be a part of the FBI. For him to look Hotch in the eye while saying all of that made me angry. Hotch was great at his job. He was the best of the best. He had been working tirelessly for decades to get where he was in his career. It wasn’t fucking guesswork. We trained and worked to learn how to profile. In a way, it was an art. Not just anyone could wander in one day and say: “I want to be a profiler.” It took more than that. It took training, education, and time. That was why it took me so damn long to get into the BAU in the first place.

The lawyer turned away from Hotch so that he could smirk to himself at his little victory. I caught him, though, as he looked up and made eye contact with me. My face was just as stone-cold as Hotch’s, but my eyes were telling a different story. Honestly, I looked like I wanted to kill him. I hardly knew him, yet I wanted to dance circles around his grave. I knew that Hotch was the protective one in our relationship, but there was something about the way that lawyer talked to him that made me want to—

“Charcoal gray,” Hotch spoke up plainly.

The lawyer’s smirk disappeared as he spun back around. “What?”

“Your socks.”

He chortled. “Well, you got one right.”

Hotch glanced over to me again, and I shifted in my seat when I felt myself grow hot. There was a look in his eyes that countered mine. While I was seeing red, he was still calm, collected, and sophisticated. He was even trying to hide a smirk. That was how he always looked when he knew that he was going to get the best of me. That look… it made my knees weak, and he knew it. That was why he glanced over in the first place.

“You match them to the color of your suit,” he said as he slowly looked back over at the lawyer, “to appear taller. You also wear lifts and you’ve had your soles replaced multiple times. One might think you’re frugal, but in reality, you’re broke. The Rolex on your wrist is a fake because you’ve already pawned the real one to pay off your debts, and you don’t want anyone to know, especially your family, because then they’d find out about your gambling addiction. I can tell you exactly what kind of gambling, too.” He shot me a quick glance. I hid my flushed face as I looked down at the ground. “Your vice is horses. Your Blackberry’s been buzzing on the table every twenty minutes, which happens to be the average time between posts from colonial downs. You’re getting race results…” I bit my lip and sank in my chair. “And every time you do, it affects your mood in court, and you’re not having a very good day. That’s because you pick horses the same way you practice law— by always taking the long shot.”

I gulped and tried to stop moving my thighs that were rubbing together for friction under my dress. I knew I made a mistake putting on Hotch’s favorite dress. I hadn’t worn it since the flight to St. Louis because it only got me in trouble the last time, but I thought that since it was a special occasion and we weren’t going into work, it would be nice. But now I could feel exactly how wet I was getting against the wooden seat beneath me, and I was cursing myself for rolling the skirt up to appear shorter, just like I always did. I was such an idiot.

“If I’m not mistaken, the results from the fifth race should be coming through any minute.”

And like clockwork, the lawyer’s phone started to buzz on the table. I looked up through my lashes to see that Hotch was grinning slightly at me. He knew what he did, that asshole. Not only had he gotten to the lawyer, but he had gotten to me, too. Fuck.

“Why don’t you tell us if your luck has changed,” Hotch concluded.

The lawyer tensed. His posture changed, his hands buried themselves into his pocket, and he cleared his throat uncomfortably. Well, if only my whole job weren’t a sham, I could have told him that his behavior meant that Hotch was right, and he was embarrassed at the profile that had been given in front of the entire court. Oh, wait. I had enough training and knowledge to make even the simplest of deductions about that man. He wasn’t unique, he wasn’t hard to read, he wasn’t special. Honestly, Hotch shouldn’t have wasted his breath profiling him in the first place, but I was glad he did, anyhow.

“No further questions, Your Honor,” the lawyer croaked, picking up his phone and stuffing it in his pocket.

“Very well. The court will be adjourned until 9AM tomorrow.” The judge banged the gavel down, and everyone moved to disperse.

Hotch came down off the stand, brushing past the lawyer without another glance or word. I stood from my seat carefully, testing to see if my knees could support me. It would have been embarrassing if I just toppled over then and there. Hotch reached out for my hand when he was close enough, and he started pulling me into the hallway outside the courtroom. I chased after him, having to skip a few steps just to keep up. When we made it out of the room, he stopped, pulled me into a sudden hug, picked me up off my feet, and spun me around. I giggled into his shoulder before he set me down carefully.

I looked at him when we parted. “Home. Now.”

“We have to go back to the office—”

“We’ll call them.” I pulled at his red tie around his neck slightly, making it look like an innocent and simple adjustment. “Please, Sir,” I whispered.

Hotch licked his lips as he looked around the hallway to make sure that no one heard. “We call them first.” I nodded. “You’ll behave until we get home.” I nodded. “Okay.” He grabbed my hand again and started pulling me out of the courthouse again.

The media was still there, and they were still pressing for questions, but Hotch and I ignored them as we made our way through. While it felt like an eternity to get into the courthouse originally, it felt like we practically teleported out. We rushed to the car. Hotch already had his phone out, and he was calling Morgan for an update. He put the phone on speaker as it dialed. I anxiously pulled at my seatbelt as Hotch started pulling out of the spot we were parked in.

Morgan picked up. “Out of court already?”

“Just finished the cross examination,” Hotch replied.

“How’d it go?”

“It went fine. What’s the update at the office?”

“We’ll just tell you when you get here,” Morgan insisted from a distance, like he was occupied with something else.

“We’re not coming in.”

Morgan scoffed, “Hotch, it’s only noon.”

“Yeah, I know, but Y/N isn’t feeling well, so we’re just going to head home.”

I glared at him, but he smirked at me.

“Okay,” Morgan sighed. “JJ and Rossi found Matloff’s birth mother. They’re there now, trying to talk to her about him and see if she’ll come forward as any kind of witness. Not much else has happened around her, unfortunately. We’re searching high and low, but it’s just like four years ago, we can’t find anything useful. Hopefully, his mom will have something that will pin him to the crimes.”

Hotch took a sharp right turn, making me grab onto the ceiling handle. He apologized quietly to me before continuing with Morgan, “Alright, well, just keep us updated. Send me a text when JJ and Rossi are done at the mother’s.”

“You got it. Tell Y/N to feel better.”

I hit a smirk by looking out the window. Hotch took a moment to clear his throat, also trying to mask the irony of Morgan’s comment that was making us snicker. “I will,” Hotch said calmly. “We’ll talk later.” And then he hung up the phone and threw it in the cup holder. “I told you to behave,” he said to me.

“I didn’t do anything!” I shouted defensively with a smile. “You can’t blame me this time.”

“I can and I am.” Hotch was trying to hide a playful smile. The longer I looked at him, though, the more he started to crack. “I love you, Y/N,” he admitted before he could let his smile shine through.

I grabbed his hand from the steering wheel and kissed his knuckles gingerly. “I love you, too.”

We pulled up to the house and I started to get excited about what was to come. The second we were in the door, I pushed him against the wall. I kicked the door closed behind me using my foot, and I ignored the ringing alarm just for a few moments so that I could get a hold on his tie and pull him in for a lustful kiss. When my lips were on his, Hotch grabbed my face and leaned over me to kiss me harder. Suddenly, he was pushing me backwards into the wall behind me, and while still kissing me and fighting for dominance with his tongue, Hotch stuck out his right hand and blindly searched for the alarm. He turned it off, then moved his hand to cup my neck. I moaned as he pinned me roughly against the wall. He parted from my lips and started panting.

“Why—”

“What you did on the stand…” I tried to kiss him again, but he tightened his grip around my neck, keeping me pinned. “I don’t know… I just…” I licked my lips. “It was hot, baby.”

His eyes turned a dark, lustful black as he smirked. “Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sir. Please.” I wiggled, trying to create friction between my legs while simultaneously trying to touch him.

“Stay still,” he demanded. I could practically see him transition into Dom space, and in return, I immediately fell into sub space. I did as he asked, holding myself back from moving, and he released me. I watched impatiently, yet still obediently, as he reached for the tie around his neck and started pulling it off. “I wore my lucky tie for you today,” he told me. I had recognized that move when he got dressed in the morning, but I didn’t think that he’d say anything about it. He only wore it now and again when he needed good luck or there was a special occasion. It was the kind of day that needed luck and celebration, I supposed. “And I couldn’t stop thinking about doing this to you.” He grabbed my wrists and tied them together. I whimpered as he pulled it as tight as he could. “Quiet.” I nodded. “Good girl.” He raised my arms over my head, and he hung my tied wrists on one of the coat hooks on the wall. “Keep them there.” I nodded again, and he kissed me as a reward. “My good girl.” I bit back a moan. “Tug gently.” I did so, pulling my hands a bit to test the strength of the hooks in order to get a feel of how hard I could squirm without ripping the panel of hooks out of the wall. “Is that okay?” I nodded. “Good girl,” he complimented again while kissing my neck. I tugged again involuntarily, wanting to just reach out and touch his hair. “What was hot about me today, baby? You can talk.”

I let out a moan that had been building in my chest before I did anything else. Hotch smirked against my skin, then bit down gently to start leaving a hickey. “The way you talked to him— talked down on him. The way you silently profiled him, and then you—” I gasped when his hands cupped my breasts and started lightly massaging them. “Then you—” My knees buckled as he reached under my dress to unclasp my bra, then slid his hands under my bra so that he could pinch my nipples. “Sir—”

“Don’t stop.”

“I can’t…”

“Yes, you can. Keep going. What did you like about how I talked to him?”

I hesitated, trying to not think about the way he was pinching and rolling my nipples between his fingers. “You… You were so calm, so collected… Just like you are now…” I bucked my hips forward when he pulled at my nipples slightly. “I’ve never seen you profile like that… Like it was fun…”

He smirked and slid his hands out from under my dress. “Do you want to know what I think about you?’ I gulped as he let out a low, wicked chuckle that came from his throat, and he got incredibly close to my face, however, he didn’t touch me yet. “I know that you’re always a needy little whore for me. Always. I know that every time you look at me, your pupils dilate, and I can tell that you’re thinking about having me fuck you so hard you see stars. I know that you’d be on your knees right now, choking on my cock, if I asked you to. But I also know that you like to be a little brat all the time because you like getting me riled up so that I punish you. I know you whine, moan, and beg for mercy, but you secretly like it when I edge or deny you. I know that you’ll pull and tug at any restraints I put you in, but you’ll never actually put your full force into it because you like being a helpless slut.” He grabbed my neck. “I know that you like when I do this…” he whispered into my ear as he squeezed. I threw my head back, giving his hand more access and him a clearer view of what he was doing so that he would know not to go too far. “I know that you liked how I talked to that man today because I degraded him, and you like being degraded, too, don’t you?” I struggled against the restraints slightly in response. “Oh, yeah. I know I hit the mark. You want to know how I know? Because I’m good at what I do, and you’re obvious.” He released my neck, and I gasped for air. “I know that I haven’t even touched you, yet you’ve probably already soaked through your panties.” He grabbed my thighs roughly. He took a moment to make sure that I had caught my breath, then pushed my thighs open until my feet shuffled to shoulder width apart. When I was spread for him, he reached down to cup my heat with his palm to feel how I had soaked my panties, just as he had suspected. “Hmmm…” he moaned in my ear, “called it.” Within an instant, he yanked my panties down, helping me step out of them carefully, however. “Open,” he demanded once he had my panties crumpled in his palm. I opened my mouth and he suddenly shoved my panties in. “Do you taste how wet I made you?”

I moaned a, “Yes, Sir,” behind my gag, and my knees buckled, the coat hook barely catching me.

“Stand up straight, slut.” He grabbed my neck again and pulled me up. “Stay like that.” His hand returned to below my dress, and without warning, he thrust two of his fingers into me. I screamed behind the gag. “You scream when you know you shouldn’t moan; did you know that? You do it whenever you’re ashamed to admit that you enjoy what I’m doing to you.” He curled his fingers inside me, and I bit down on the gag to make sure I wouldn’t scream again. He chuckled, “And you get quiet when you don’t want to be punished.” He squinted. “What would I have to punish you for? Hmmm? Being a needy whore?” He hit my g-spot on purpose. “For jumping me the second we get into the house? For wearing this dress today and thinking that I wouldn’t notice? Let me tell you something. I gave that profile because all I could think about was getting home and torturing you all afternoon, so I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.” His thumb found my clit and started playing with it at an unrelenting pace. “And now that we’re here—” I screamed again when I felt my orgasm approaching, and it was getting extremely hard to stay up on my feet. I wanted to collapse again, but Hotch was glaring at me with a dare to try it. “Cum now and I’ll leave you like this all night.” My eyes pouted. “You better hold it.”

“Sir—”

“No.”

I whined, trying to hold still to prevent added stimulation. My walls clenched around his fingers, my stomach tightened, and I held onto his tie around my wrists to pray that I wouldn’t tip over the edge. Hotch had other plans, though. He worked harder to make me cum His fingers kept curling against my g-spot, his bicep bulging in his shirt to show all the effort he was going to in order to keep pumping his fingers in and out of me at an ungodly pace.

“Hold it for twenty seconds while I count, and I’ll let you cum.”

I nodded, screwing my eyes shut so that I could concentrate. “Yes, Sir.”

Hotch started counting backwards from twenty. He went slow and steady, watching me intently as I tried so hard not to fall apart. Trying not to cum around him while also putting energy into staying on my feet was nearly impossible, even when he got to ten. And he slowed down his counting even further. The asshole was taking about two to three seconds between every count, and I was so close to the fucking edge. I could practically feel myself already tipping over by five, but I kept trying to hold on for as long as I could.

“Three…” His thumb on my clit changed direction and pace, making me scream out again. “Two…” He hit my g-spot again. “One…” I just had to wait for the order. Any second now. I was about to tip over. “Cum.”

I came for him as he said it. My knees buckled again, and I kept screaming behind the gag, cursing his name over and over again. My walls tightened even further somehow, my legs shook, my arms pulled against the coat rack holding me back, and I felt my breath leave my lungs. Hotch pulled my panties out of my mouth. Before I could say anything, his lips were back on mine. He swallowed each of my moans as he continued to fuck me through my high. When I was done, though, and my body gave out, Hotch slowed his fingers.

“Good girl,” he whispered, somehow just as breathless as I was. I let my head fall forward onto his shoulder while he slid his fingers out of me. “Suck,” he demanded, shrugging his shoulder to lift my head. Exhausted, I looked up at him and let him shove his wet fingers into my mouth. “My good cum slut.” I moaned around his fingers. “You okay?” I nodded. He pulled his hand away. “Can you stand?”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Once you let me down, I think I’ll fall.”

He snickered, “I’ll catch you.” He wrapped one of his arms around me while he reached up to pull my arms off the coat hook. As my tied wrists fell in front of me, Hotch caught me, just like he promised. “Did I get my profile right?” he laughed.

I hit his shoulder with my clasped fists. “That’s the only time I’ll ever let you profile me.”

“They say while shaking against me after screaming my name.”

I hit him again. “I could profile you, too, you know.”

“Mhm, you’ll have to do that after this,” he said before throwing me over his shoulder easily. I tried to protest, but my hands were still tied, and he spanked my ass when I tried to kick at him. I felt Hotch’s phone buzz against my hip, though, as we made our way upstairs. Hotch waited until I was sitting on the bed to check what was going on. “JJ and Rossi said that Matloff sent her the victims’ jewelry.”

My eyes widened. “Will she testify?”

Hotch nodded. “Yeah.”

“Come here,” I coaxed him towards me. Hotch threw his phone on the bed and leaned over me. I draped my tied wrists over his head, trapping them around his neck so that he couldn’t escape me. “I love you.”

Hotch leaned in for a kiss. “I love you, too.” And then he pushed me back onto the mattress.

* * *

In court the following morning, Hotch met up with Cece early to review the new evidence the team found. They also discussed the questions they were going to throw at Matloff’s mother. It sounded like we really had a good, winning case. That was a relief, at least. After yesterday's fiasco, we were on a winning high, but we needed to maintain that momentum. Bringing this new evidence forward was going to throw the defense for a loop, which meant that they would need time to examine the evidence themselves and prepare questions for Nina. Ultimately, that just meant that we would spend about thirty minutes setting up the court, another thirty reviewing the trial thus far, then the prosecution would get to start questioning Matloff’s mother. That was it. Short and sweet. Impactful. This was going to bury Matloff.

Hotch kissed me in the hallway outside the courtroom before he went in with Cece. Since he was part of the prosecution team (somehow), he got to sit up front with Cece this time, unlike yesterday, when he sat back in the crowd with me. I sat in the first row, just behind him. Just as anticipated, the first hour came and went without anything of interest, but then Cece was called to invite her next witness to testify.

“The prosecution would like to call Mrs. Nina Moore to the stand,” Cece said after standing from her seat at the table.

Everyone turned to watch as a woman sitting in the back of the courtroom stood. She was a tiny woman in every way, but she fit the description of Matloff's ideal targets. Slim, tiny, brunette, brown eyes women. It suddenly made sense why he hunted victims with that appearance because they were surrogates for his mother. His obsession with Native American culture stemmed from her, and when she turned him away (the stressor), he took it out on women who mirrored her image. If only they had that for the profile four years ago, or even a few days prior to her taking the stand. Would’ve been a huge help.

After being sworn in, Nina took a seat so that Cece could begin questioning her. Cece immediately dove in with, “Can you please state your name for the court?”

“Nina Moore.”

“And what is your relationship to the defendant?”

“I’m his birth mother,” Nina admitted. “I gave him up for adoption when he was a baby.”

“And that was how long ago?”

“Thirty-seven years.”

“So, you didn’t have a relationship with him?”

“No. I never saw him until 2003.”

“How did that happen?”

“He found me,” Nina whispered, looking down at her hands. “He wanted to learn about his heritage, my family. We met at a café, talked for a bit, then he left.”

“You talked about your family?”

“Yes.”

“What specifically?”

“He said he wanted to come home, to be a part of my family. But I told him that I couldn’t do that.”

“You felt that he was being irrational.”

“No, not at all. I just thought that he was a little lost. He wanted to belong to something.” Her voice started to crack as she suppressed the cry bubbling in her chest. “Turning him away was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do!”

“Mrs. Moore, did the defendant ever try to contact you after that?” Cece asked, trying to get back on topic.

“Yes. He sent me something in the mail.”

“What was it?”

“A necklace. Two months later, I got another one. Then two months after that, I got a watch. I thought he was trying to persuade me with gifts or something. I never imagined…” She fell short of admitting the truth to the court.

“Your Honor,” Cece began, making her way back to her table, “I’d like to enter into evidence People’s Exhibits ‘F’ through ‘H’.” She picked up the bags of evidence and brought them back over to Nina on the stand. “Are these the items that you received in the mail?”

“Yes.”

“And this watch that you see in this bag, do you also see it in this photo?” she asked while holding up both pieces of evidence.

Nina froze. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Let the record show,” Cece said, turning towards the jury, “that the watch worn in this photograph of the third murder victim, Darci Corbet, was the same watch that the witness received from the defendant in the mail.” Cece put the evidence down. “I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

“Thank you, Counselor. Court will resume tomorrow morning at 9AM for cross examination of the witness,” the judge said, banging his gavel.

As we were all dismissed, and I stood to greet Hotch, I was taken aback when he walked over to Matloff’s table to look at something after he had been taken back into custody. My eyes followed Hotch, confusion washing over me. What did he see over there that was of interest? I didn’t understand. So I tried whispering his name to catch his attention, but he didn’t look at me. Cece and I exchanged a glance, and we both shrugged. I hissed Hotch’s name again, this time getting him to look at me. He went back to his seat at the prosecution’s table, grabbed his things, reached over the median to grab my hand, and started dragging me out of the courtroom.

“Hotch,” I called his name again quietly as we entered the hallway, “what is it?”

“I think that Matloff is getting his memories back,” Hotch said eagerly.

Cece and I exchanged another confused glance. When I looked back at Hotch, I asked, “What makes you think so?” 

“I looked at the notepad in front of him during the trial today, and there were tears on it.”

“So?” Cece questioned.

“You don’t have that kind of reaction unless you’re connected,” Hotch explained.

If what he was saying about the tears, then it was true. I mean, I had my suspicions concerning his behavior in court, but I was never sure, especially considering how his evaluation the other day went. I thought that he genuinely didn’t remember anything and didn’t have any more sadistic tendencies because of how he passed that test. But Hotch was right, something was off. It was possible that Matloff was getting his memories back. If that were the case, then we needed to speak with him or the guards protecting him immediately to see if there was any new information we could use.

“I’ll go talk to the guards to see if they’ve noticed anything weird about his behavior, or if he’s mentioned anything about getting his memory back,” I offered. Hotch nodded, agreeing that it was a good idea. I started making my way down the hallway where Matloff was taken so that he could get changed back into his prison clothes. I flashed my badge to the court official standing guard outside, and he let me through without hesitation. “Thanks,” I whispered, moving past him carefully. I turned the corner and came to a sudden halt when I bumped into someone. “Sorry,” I apologized. When I looked up, I realized that I had run into Matloff, who was holding a gun. I reached for my weapon in my holster, but he already had his pointed at my temple. “Okay,” I mumbled, surrendering my hands. “Okay.”

“Don’t scream or try anything,” he demanded gruffly, grabbing my gun from my hip.

“Okay,” I agreed again.

“Walk quietly and calmly with me outside.” He pushed me towards the emergency exit down the hallway. With my hands still raised, I led the way towards the door. “Do you have a car?”

“I drove here with my boyfriend.”

“That’ll work.”

I pushed the door open. An alarm started ringing, triggering Matloff to push me out faster. With the gun pressed to my back, we hurried through the parking lot, avoiding detection from the media since we were leaving through a backdoor, and they were focused on finding out what the alarm was at the front door. I led Matloff to Hotch’s car, and he made me get into the driver’s seat while he got into the passenger’s.

“Your cellphone,” Matloff gestured with the gun before pointing it in my face again. “Throw it out the window.” I silently cursed him for having enough brains to realize that Hotch would try to call or track me through it the second he noticed I was gone. “Now!” he yelled at me when I didn’t move. I nodded vigorously, grabbing my phone from my pocket. I rolled the window down and threw my phone out a ways to make sure the car wouldn’t crush it. “Start driving.”

“Where?” I asked calmly.

“Blue Ridge Parkway.”

I screwed my eyes shut. That wasn’t good news for me. Matloff clearly had his memories back— if he even lost them in the first place. He obviously had his urge for murder back, at least, which meant that taking me to Blue Ridge Parkway was going to be his end game. Kill the fed, and he won. Even if he got caught, killing a cop— especially a fed— was the most impressive and respectable thing anyone could do when it came to prison rep. Matloff would be a saint on the inside. Great.

No one noticed us pull out of the parking lot. No one stopped us on our way out there, either. I thought that Hotch would have had the whole city on lock down, every street blocked off, and Blue Ridge Parkway under surveillance. Yet, no one was out there. Matloff opened the glove compartment as we pulled up to the trail, and he grabbed the extra pair of handcuffs that Hotch and I kept in there. He told me to put them on, which was probably just to make sure that I wouldn’t try anything still. He most likely knew who I was considering all the time I spent in the courtroom with him, and how clingy I was with Hotch. If he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t try to stop him, restraining me was the best way to do that. He had thought this through.

“You have your memories back, don’t you?” I asked as we got out of the car. I figured I could at least know the truth before he’d inevitably shoot me. “Or did you have them this whole time?”

Matloff was calm as we started walking down the path together. He didn’t walk ahead of me or behind me, just at my side a few feet away. Both of the guns he now had weren’t pointed at me, either. The one he stole from me was tucked in the back of his waistband, the one he stole from the guard swinging at his side as we walked. He probably knew that I wouldn’t try to run considering it would be foolish to run away from a serial killer with a gun. However, what he failed to realize was that I wasn’t going to run because I noticed something else. Matloff had always been off to me. Always. Since meeting him, I knew that something was wrong. But, now, as we were walking down the path where he preyed on his other victims, it seemed like his focus wasn’t on me. He was intent on getting somewhere. Even if he was going to kill me, that was going to follow whatever he wanted to find or do. I wasn’t going to run because I was curious. I wanted to know what the hell was so important to escape jail, kidnap a fed, and return to his crime scenes for.

“My memories,” he started explaining quietly, “started coming back last night. They’re in bits and pieces, and they come in hot flashes… I see what I did— who I was, and I hate it.”

“Then why do this?”

Matloff looked over at me. “Because I have to know the truth.”

“About how you strangled those three women?”

Matloff didn’t respond to my question. All he said was, “I’m sorry for scaring you and doing all of this.” I cocked a brow. “I just couldn’t let you stop me.”

“Stop you from coming out here? Why? Where are we going, Matloff?”

“Linville Falls,” Matloff said, looking up at the running waterfall we just approached. We came to a slow and steady halt as we both admired it for a moment. It was so beautiful and peaceful out there. I finally understood why he liked it so much, but it still didn’t answer why we were there. Before I could ask again, though, Matloff said, “You can go now, if you want. I won’t stop you. I promise.” He moved the gun he was holding in his hand to his waistband. I watched as he stepped off the path and started trudging through the mud and tall grass to get to something in the distance. “Go on,” he insisted, sensing that I was still watching him.

I didn’t move, though. I knew I should’ve made a run for it, or at least tried to disarm him, but I didn’t. He hadn’t told me why we were out there yet, and I didn’t know what he was looking for out in the field under the waterfall. But my interest was piqued when he got down on his knees and started digging through the dirt with his hands like a mad man.

I stepped into the tall grass, making my way over to him cautiously. He was still a threat, though he had proven that he had no interest in killing me. If I disturbed whatever he was doing, he still could’ve shot me or punched me or something. I knew that I had to be careful and maintain a safe distance.

And then we both froze when his hands hit something in the ground. I stumbled back a slight step when I saw a corpse emerging as he kept digging. Hotch suspected that there had been more victims, but he could never prove it… Yet there we were. Matloff was digging up a dead body and I was just watching like an idiot.

“Who… Who is that?” I asked.

Matloff sniffled as he pulled it out of the grave. “The first woman I ever killed.” He looked up at me with red eyes. He was crying. “I told you I had to know the truth… I wasn’t sure if I really killed those women until we got here, and it suddenly all came back to me.” He sat down on his tailbone and cradled the corpse. “This isn’t who I am anymore… I just had to make sure that you wouldn’t tell anyone before I could come out here to make sure it was real. I wasn’t convinced until just then when my fingers hit her skull.” He let out a sob. “I’m so sorry.”

“Matloff,” I crouched down, “are there other bodies out here?”

He shook his head. “It was just her.”

“Y/N!” Hotch called from the tree line.

I glanced over my shoulder to see him and Reid approaching with a SWAT team hot on their heels. “Wait!” I raised my cuffed hands in the air, waving them around to signal for them to stop. “It’s fine!” I yelled after noticing that they were all aiming their weapons at Matloff. “Don’t shoot!” Reid and Hotch slowed down, gesturing for the SWAT team to hold back. “He’s not a threat!”

With Hotch’s weapon still raised at Matloff, he carefully approached. “Brian Matloff, put your hands where I can see them.”

“Hotch—” I tried to protest, but Reid grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out of the way.

“Hands, Brian!”

“Stop there, please!” Matloff yelled back. “Just give me a minute… please…”

“I can’t do that, Brian.”

“Who is she?” Reid asked me quietly.

I glanced at him quickly before looking back at Matloff and Hotch. “She was his first.”

Hotch heard me, his shoulders falling slightly before he remembered to keep his steady stance. “Just put her down, Brian. Don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

“I’m sorry,” Matloff cried quietly. “I’m so sorry…”

“Maybe you are, but you still have to pay for what’s been done.”

Matloff scoffed as he pulled one of the guns from his waistband. “I might as well just die right here… They’re going to put me on death row, anyhow. What’s the point?”

“You don’t know that,” I said, stepping forward again, despite Reid and Hotch’s protests. I stumbled through the grass, praying that I wouldn’t trip while my hands were still cuffed because I wouldn’t be able to save my fall. “The jury might not put you on death row. They might see your new slate— your innocence.” I carefully kneeled beside him, ignoring the corpse in his arms and the way he was waving the gun around aimlessly. “Matloff, look at me.” He did so. “You can still prove that you’re a good man. You could have killed me out here, but you didn’t. You’re clearly sorry for the things you did in the past. Show that in court. Prove your newfound innocence.”

“I’m— I’m scared,” he admitted to me in a hushed tone that only I could hear. I nodded understandingly, but my eyes were still pleading for him to do the right thing. This wasn’t the answer. This wasn’t the way out. “Okay…” he mumbled, dropping the gun.

Hotch carefully approached again, his aim still trained on Matloff. As Reid came over to grab the gun on the ground and the one in the back of Matloff’s waistband, Hotch grabbed his cuffs. “Put the body down, Brian,” Hotch ordered. Matloff did as he was told, gently resting the corpse on the grass before standing up so that Hotch could arrest him. “Do you have any more weapons on you?”

Matloff shook his head. “No.”

Hotch slapped his handcuffs on Matloff’s wrists, then passed him off to the SWAT team to be transported back to the jail in town. Reid came over to us as Hotch started getting my handcuffs off with the key from the car. He must’ve seen that Matloff stole them from the glovebox and made the smart decision to bring the key.

The second the handcuffs were off, Hotch threw his arms around me. His hug caught me off guard, making me stumble in his hold before I could hug him back. I didn’t expect that while we were still on the job, around our friends, on a crime scene, and in front of an Unsub that Hotch would pull me in for a desperate hug like that, I didn’t protest. I held him back, closing my eyes as I inhaled his scent. He smelled like his Aqua Velva aftershave, which was so different from the forest and waterfall scents nearby. Honestly, he smelled like home. I needed home after the day I had.

“You okay?” he asked me quietly before kissing the top of my head.

I nodded against his chest. “I’m fine.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go on your own.”

“We didn’t know.”

“Still.”

“It’s fine, Hotch. I’m fine. He wasn’t going to hurt me.”

Hotch squeezed my shoulders. “I love you.”

I nuzzled against him. “I love you, too.”


	25. HALEY DOPPELGANGER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 3 Episode 20. Two months after part twenty-four.

It was a quiet morning at the office. At ten o’clock, we all gathered in the conference room to discuss cases, but before we could even sit down, JJ told us that there was nothing for our unit. It wasn’t entirely uncommon for this to happen, and it was always a relief because it meant that we would all get to go home early, which meant getting to see Jack sooner. With no paperwork to do, either we were all free to just wait around until something came about for us to do. That was the odd part. If we didn’t have a case, we at least had paperwork… but, nope. Honestly, if we wanted to, Hotch could just send us home for the day, but I think that all of us were still hoping that something interesting would come up. Also, what was the point in leaving if we could just be called back at any point? Might as well just stick around until three when I was supposed to pick Jack up from school.

While all of us were hanging out in the bullpen, JJ, Garcia, and Rossi with us, too, Hotch was up in his office. His door was closed, the blinds were tilted slightly, yet I could still catch a glimpse of him talking with someone on the phone. He seemed worried. He wasn’t pacing the width of his office quite yet, but he was tapping his fountain pen against his desk as fast as he could in order to keep his anxious body up with his racing mind. No one else seemed to notice, though—probably because they didn’t want to know if it had to do with a case yet. We were all content with just sitting around, chatting and laughing. If a case came up, so be it. If a case didn’t come up, that would be a miracle we would happily take.

“Do you think it’s about those shootings in New York?” I finally asked, turning my attention away from Hotch’s office long enough to gauge the team’s reactions to my question.

It had been on my mind for the past few days since we first heard about it on the news. The FBI hadn’t been called in to investigate the crimes yet, but we were all keeping tabs on it to see if it would get worse. There had been five shootings in the past two weeks, each of them in public spaces, but no witnesses. No one could describe the Unsub, let alone describe what happened It was like a ghost was shooting random civilians in the streets. Yet the NYPD was convinced that the incidences were all unrelated. Considering New York’s rising crime rates, it was a fair assumption, I supposed, but with five murders with the same M.O., our team was starting to raise brows and ask if the NYPD was ever going to call someone in for an outside perspective.

“Why would you think that?” Rossi asked. “Has Hotch said something about it at home?”

I shook my head. “We haven’t talked about it at all.”

“So, then, maybe it’s nothing.”

I looked back up at Hotch’s office, keenly aware that it wasn’t  _ nothing _ . Something was wrong, it was just a matter of what. Perhaps it had to do with Haley, or Jack, or the Director, or another case he was just learning about. But if it were a case, wouldn’t it have gone through JJ first? It must have been personal, then, which meant that I would hear about it from him sooner than later. There was nothing to be worried about right now.

And then he stood from his desk and hung up the phone. Everyone seemed to be watching him with me now, trying to figure out if either Rossi or I were correct. Hotch grabbed his cell, a few files from his desk, and hurried to his door. The second it was open, he caught us all watching him, but he didn’t waver.

“Conference room,” he ordered, still making his way there.

We all leapt to our feet and scurried together towards the boardroom. “My money’s on New York,” I whispered to Rossi.

“I’ll take that bet.”

Hotch was standing at the monitor, the remote in his hand as he pulled up the news. When it was on, I heard Rossi sigh disappointedly. I grinned and elbowed his side playfully. Maybe he shouldn’t have actually taken that deal. The news was already talking about yet another shooting in New York, this time at a subway station in the middle of the night. No witnesses. No evidence. No leads. It was amazing that we were being called in this late.

“Don’t sit,” Hotch said. “We won’t be here long. We’ve been called in to help the NYPD with the random shootings.” Finally. “We’ll debrief more on the plane, but for now, what you need to know is that the police have eliminated any connections to organized crime, terrorism, or vendettas. There are no ties between any of the victims, and all of their records are clean. We’re looking at a randomized killer. He does the same thing every time. He keeps his head down, hood on, hands covered to hide his skin color. He shoots the victims quickly as he’s walking and doesn’t look back.” Hotch turned off the TV. “Wheels up in twenty. Garcia—” She looked up at the mention of her name, shocked that she was being addressed during a meeting she technically wasn’t even supposed to be at. “You’re coming with us.”

“Sir—”

“See you all on the jet.” Hotch collected his things again and pushed past the team to make his way back to his office so that he could grab his go-bag.

The rest of us were left in the boardroom, glancing between each other, waiting for someone to make the first move. It was odd that we weren’t even taking the time to sit down and discuss more of the case first. I mean, what happened to the case going through JJ, talking about it as a team in the boardroom, then discussing more on the jet, and so on? Why go to Hotch first and why was he in such a rush?

I made the first move, rushing back down to my desk in the bullpen to call Jessica to see if she could pick up Jack, and then text Haley to let her know that we wouldn’t be back for a bit. Jessica said she was fine with picking up Jack, and when I texted Haley, she thanked me for letting her know. She also told me to keep an eye on Aaron and to call Jack when we were at the hotel. When that was sorted, I grabbed my go-bag from under my desk and walked with the rest of the team out of the building.

When we got on the jet, Hotch immediately called for us to huddle up and start discussing the case. Since it had come through him, Hotch knew the most about the case. He knew what the cops had done for the investigation, he knew the victimology, the M.O., the  _ possible _ leads, everything. We were just there to play catch up and then try to give what insight we could before landing in New York.

“Each victim was killed in a different neighborhood. There was no relation with their homes, their jobs, their hobbies, or so on. No similar physical or personality traits, according to the victims’ friends and family.”

“What leads do they have that they haven’t told the press about?” I asked.

“None,” Hotch shook his head. “Agent Kate Joyner has been leading the FBI-NYPD joint task force—”

“The FBI’s been involved with this already?” Morgan interrupted.

“Pretty much since the beginning. Kate called for our help after the sixth murder last night, though.”

“Wait. Kate Joyner?” Rossi clarified. “Isn’t she the agent from Interpole we gained a few years back?”

“I heard she can be a bit of a pain in the ass,” Morgan chuckled.

“I didn’t think so. We worked together back in the day when she was still working for Scotland Yard,” Hotch admitted.

“You… worked together?” Emily raised a brow. None of us were aware that Hotch had ever liaised with Scotland Yard before. One would think that I would have known about that. “When?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hotch deflected. “Let’s just focus on the case, please. She’s leading the case, we’re just there to profile. So, just… follow her lead on this one.”

‘Follow her lead’? We never followed anyone’s lead. We worked with other units, SWAT, and the local police departments that needed our help; but the only person we directly answered to was Hotch. Why was he changing that for this girl, Kate? What was more concerning to me was that Hotch knew who this woman was—they were clearly friends at one point or another, and I had never even heard of her. It was like Hotch covered up this entire part of his life that I didn’t know about. Like, when the hell did he go to England? When did he meet Kate? How long did they work together?

I took a breath to relax. I didn’t need to get caught up in my thoughts. The reality was that Hotch and Haley had been together since high school. He loved Haley with everything he had while they were still together. He would have never cheated on her, just as he would never cheat on me— though I couldn’t say she didn’t show him the same courtesy, but that was a theory for another time. Hotch was probably just old friends with this Kate lady, just as he was old friends with Rossi. There was nothing to be suspicious of, and there was definitely nothing to be jealous of. I just needed to remind myself that this was about a case, nothing else.

* * *

When we arrived at the New York field office, we headed up to Kate’s unit’s floor. She was supposedly waiting for us up there with the two lead detectives from the NYPD who were assigned to this case, too. On the way up, Hotch seemed nervous and fidgety, which certainly wasn’t like him. I mean, I knew from Rossi that Hotch used to be like that, so maybe it was just habits of seeing an old friend again; but it was still unsettling to see that he was so wrapped up in the thought of seeing Kate that he wasn’t even making eye contact with any of us or trying to tell me and Morgan that we needed to be on our best behavior.

Once the elevator doors were open, Hotch stepped out, leading us all into the office in search of Kate and the detectives. We looked around, taking in how big the office was. This unit that the FBI had given Kate was ridiculous. I mean, the BAU was considerably big, but this was almost twice that, and everyone was running around, busy with work around the case.

My shoulders fell and I stopped in place when I saw a woman approaching us with a smile on her face. That was definitely Kate, there was no doubt about it… She was gorgeous. She walked so smoothly, but still held a poise that commanded everyone’s reluctant respect. And when she saw Hotch, her smile grew even more.

“Aaron,” she welcomed with open arms.

“Kate,” he smiled back, accepting her hug.

My eyes stayed glued to them and their embrace, despite the fact that the rest of the team was glancing between them and me. ‘Aaron’? ‘Kate’? ‘Aaron’… I was still trying to convince myself that it was nothing, and I shouldn’t have to be that petty person who got all jealous suddenly without an explanation. It was nothing, right? Just two old friends reuniting… Two friends that happened to hug a little longer than necessary and then stare into each other’s eyes as they parted— Oh, my fucking god.

JJ linked her arm with mine and pulled me close. “Is it just me or does she look exactly like Haley?”

Oh, boy, I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one who took notice. I thought I was going fucking crazy. Kate’s blonde hair, her small nose, her brown eyes, her tight lips, her short height, her tall posture… She was a mirror image of Haley… Just… British. It was so odd. I hadn’t anticipated that I’d be meeting Haley’s doppelganger. I mean, I never even expected to meet Haley in the first place, but now there were two of her. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?

I remembered how I tried to convince myself on the plane that there was no chance in hell that Hotch would have cheated on Haley, but when I saw Kate, I realized that it was entirely possible. If he really spent a long time in England, then he probably ended up missing Haley a lot… With someone around him who looked eerily similar to the wife he missed so much, if there was a night with one too many drinks or something, it was entirely possible that  _ something _ happened between them.

I felt so stupid. I wasn’t a jealous person, and I certainly wasn’t one to speculate about Hotch’s past. We had both done things that we weren’t proud of. We had done things that we just hadn’t gotten around to discussing yet. But all the signs seemed to be there. But the worst part was that it pointed to the fact that Hotch seemed to have a type… A type that I didn’t amount to. I felt my self-confidence crash just by looking at Kate.

“Kate, this is my team. David Rossi, Derek Morgan, Spencer, Reid, Emily Prentiss, Jennifer Jareau, Penelope Garcia, and—” Hotch hesitated when his eyes met mine. “And… Y/N Greenaway.” He must have recognized that the wheels in my mind were turning, and I was working overtime to understand what was going on. He must have also recognized my shyness and the way I didn’t wave or smile at Kate politely.

“Thank you all for being here.” Kate smiled less now, like she was just trying to be courteous compared to her genuine happiness in seeing Hotch for the first time in years. “If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask. For now, I believe that accommodations have been made for your technical analyst to review the city’s security footage. The rest of you, these are Detectives Brustin and Cooper,” Kate gestured to the two men standing to her left. They nodded and smiled shortly, seemingly less than impressed with our appearance. “I’ll leave you all to discuss the case with them. All I ask is that you run everything by me first. It’s been my experiences that having one butt on the line is enough.”

Detective Brustin rolled his eyes and mocked Kate's accent, “Yes, ma’am.”

Kate tried to ignore his rudeness after stepping closer to Hotch to whisper something. “Is there a chance we could talk privately before you go running off?”

“Yeah,” Hotch nodded with a whisper. They waited for a moment, their faces close together, their eyes searching each other’s.

As they walked off together, Emily and Garcia shuffled over to me and JJ.

“They, um,” Emily cleared her throat, “ _ liaised  _ together.”

“I don’t understand,” I admitted quietly, my go-bag falling to the ground. The girls’ grins disappeared in an instant when they realized that I wasn’t taking it all as a joke. “I thought I was the only one besides Haley…” My eyes followed Kate and Hotch as they walked into her office. She leaned against her desk, crossing her arms a little too tightly over her chest. Hotch didn’t sit or keep his distance. My breath hitched as he stood just in front of her, their knees practically touching. “They were high school sweethearts,” I continued to explain about Haley and Hotch. “I didn’t think that there was any point where they weren’t together before their divorce.” I looked over at Morgan, who had turned away from Rossi, Reid, and the detectives to pay attention to our conversation. “What did I miss?” I practically asked him directly, my eyes pouting.

“Hey,” Rossi called us all over. I broke away from my trance long enough to grab my go-bag from the floor and walk over with the team. “Morgan and I will go with Detective Brustin to the latest crime scene, find out what we can about this guy. The rest of you will stay here to help Reid look at the geographical information and start building the profile.”

“And Hotch?” Morgan asked.

Everyone looked back over at Kate’s office.

“Hotch… He seems a little busy. Just catch him up with your work here when you’re done.” Rossi avoided making eye contact with me as he turned back to the team. “Get to work.”

We all dispersed. Morgan, Rossi, and Brustin headed for the elevators; meanwhile, Emily, JJ, and I went with Reid to the boardroom we were given to work in. While they all got to work, I sat down at the table in the middle of the room and spun around in my chair to face Kate’s office. Her and Hotch were still talking privately, but his demeanor had changed entirely. He was a few steps away from her now, his arms crossed over his chest, his back towards her. We both stared at each other for a quick moment before he looked away.

Suddenly, Hotch was moving towards her door. They were finishing up. I pushed myself out of my seat and quietly hurried over to the door of Kate’s office. Hotch was wrapping up their conversation, though he was switching his gaze towards me every other step I made towards him. When I was within reach of him, he closed Kate’s office door behind him.

“We need to talk,” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling him to the side of the room. I let go of his hand and turned back to face him with crossed arms. “I’m not a jealous person, Hotch. I never have been, and I don’t plan on starting now. I think it’s stupid and I think that we’re both mature enough to not run into any problems when it comes to any past relationships. But I  _ need _ to know something, and I need you to be honest with me.” He nodded. “Were you and Kate ever together in any way?”

Hotch wrinkled his brows together and shook his head before chuckling at me like the question was unwarranted and unexpected. What else did he expect? Kate looked exactly like his ex-wife, and they  _ hugged _ — something Hotch hardly did with anyone other than me— and they talked privately, and he was smiling at her, and laughing with her, and… Shit. I told him I wasn’t jealous, and I swore to myself that I wasn’t, but… Fuck. I didn’t know what else to think. Something happened between them and I wanted to know what. Not because I wanted to find reasons to be more jealous or protective because I knew that he would never cheat on me, but because… Well… I wasn’t entirely sure. But, dammit, I wanted to know.

“Kate and I are just friends,” he insisted. “We never did anything.” I cocked a brow at him, and he rolled his eyes slightly. “We never kissed, we never held hands, we never… _did_ _anything_. Nothing. We’re just friends. I promise.”

I nodded. I felt like such an idiot. This wasn’t who I was. Hotch and I were both grown, mature people who loved each other more than anything. Even if something did happen, it would have been a long time ago, and it wouldn’t have affected our relationship. I was just relieved to know the truth, even though I felt like a total jealous moron.

“I’m glad you asked me, though,” he complimented with a smile. I looked up at him as he continued. “I’d rather you ask than silently get jealous over nothing and turn it into a  _ thing _ .”

I knew in my mind that if Hotch truly did love me— which, of course, I knew that he did— then there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Hearing him say it to my face reassured me that all I needed to know was the truth, straight from his mouth, and I could move on and do my job. Like he said, there was no reason to ponder in silence and let jealousy build for no reason. Him and Kate were friends. I had to trust that. Hotch promised once that he would never lie to me, so if he said that there was no history between them, then there wasn’t. I believed him.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“I love you, too.” He grabbed my left hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Thank you. Seriously.” And then his phone started ringing. We both sighed at the ruined moment as he dug it out of his pocket. “Hotchner,” he said into it while still staring at me. “Alright. We’ll be there soon.” He hung up just as quickly as he answered. “Morgan says that there’s been another murder a few blocks from where him, Rossi, and the detectives are.”

“Let’s go,” I said quietly, turning away from him.

He held my hand tighter and pulled me back to face him. “We’re okay, right?”

I nodded. “I trust you, Hotch. If you say nothing happened, then nothing happened. I’m not going to question that.”

He searched my eyes for a moment. “Thank you.”

“You’ve gotta think of a more creative way of saying ‘thank you’ at some point.” I smirked, turning away from him again so that we could head down to the car, but he didn’t follow me like I expected. He was smiling at me, but he was waiting for an opportunity to go tell Kate about the new crime scene. Right. I forgot. Kate. Just as soon as I grew jealous of her, I had entirely forgotten about her. “Go,” I told him. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

He silently hurried off to her office to let her know. I rolled my eyes to myself and made my way to the elevators. I wasn’t jealous. I trusted Hotch. I loved Hotch. He made a promise to me a couple of months ago that he would never lie to me ever again. He looked me in the eye and told me that we would never hold secrets back. I asked Hotch straight up if him and Kate were involved, and he told me that they never were. I had to believe him. I  _ did _ believe him. They were friends, just like he said. And he was only going to tell her because she was still the lead on this case, and she had asked us to keep her updated on any new developments. It made sense. I shouldn’t have been pondering it too long.

When they got to the car together, Hotch took the front seat with me, while Kate took the back. At least that didn’t change. I drove us down to the crime scene with Hotch’s navigation help. It was somewhat out there for us, but just like Hotch said, it wasn’t far from the other crime scene that Morgan and Rossi were looking at. But the scene had already been taped off, which made traffic horrible, and it was nearly impossible to get into our own damn crime scene. From the backseat, Kate had to argue with two different police officers about letting us in before Rossi finally noticed us from the street corner and waved us through.

“It’s definitely our guy,” Brustin said. “Same M.O. Middle of the day, random, no pattern in victimology, hurried off before anyone could get a good look at him.”

“There wasn’t a single witness?” I asked while getting out of the car. We were on a busy street corner. Hell, the cops were having trouble holding back the crowds. How did no one see a guy shoot someone in the middle of the day on a busy road in fucking New York?

Brustin shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Y/N, go talk with Rossi to catch up on what he knows,” Hotch ordered me.

Brustin squinted, almost like he was offended by that command. To be fair, the way Hotch phrased it made it sound like he didn’t trust Brustin or Cooper and what conclusions they had come to. While we obviously still held our team’s intuition to a higher standard and were more likely to trust what our friends would tell us, Hotch’s order was still offensive to the detective, and I didn’t blame him for feeling that way. That being said, I didn’t argue with him either. I nodded and walked up to Rossi, who was standing over the body.

“Seven murders and he’s finally communicating with us,” Rossi told me, handing me an evidence bag.

I looked down at what was inside the clear bag while raising a curious brow. It was a Tarot card— specifically the card for Death. If the title on the bottom of the card wasn’t obvious enough, the artwork of Death riding a rose that was trampling over a king was a sure tell of what was going on. But why do this now? Why send us a message after so many deaths? It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the M.O. Realistically, the obvious answer was that the Unsub was trying to tell us that he saw himself as Death. He viewed what he was doing as an act of defiance against a higher power, which would be the king in reference to the card, but outside of that, it could have been a number of things. This could have been personally or politically motivated, but it was unlikely that these killings were sadistic or sexual. We didn’t need a card to tell us that. These shootings were long distance kills. There was no satisfaction that came from them, especially with how fast the Unsub was fleeing the scene. But toying with us because he knew that the FBI was involved now… That changed how we were building the profile. It meant that this probably wasn’t personally motivated, which left politics.

“Are we absolutely sure that this is the same guy?” I asked Rossi. He looked confused, like he didn’t understand where I was coming from. I decided to clarify. “Sure, the M.O. is the same, but this card changes everything. Why would he deviate from what he knows?”

“To tell us that he knows we’re here.”

“Obviously. But why does he care? The killings are signal enough. Why communicate like this?”

“Maybe Reid will figure something out.” Rossi shrugged.

I nodded an agreement. Something was different about this whole crime scene compared to the last ones. Despite how rushed they seemed, they were still more… I don’t know,  _ organized _ in some way. Before, the Unsub was waiting until the target was alone to shoot them. But this was the middle of the day, around hundreds of witnesses. And the change in M.O. almost made the scene feel sloppy, in some way. As much as I hated to admit it, Reid could possibly give us some insight into the card, or maybe Garcia would be able to find something on the street cameras. Either way, we were stuck where we were. Those who were still at the office would be more helpful.

The drive back to the office was slower. It felt like going down to the crime scene in the first place was a waste of our time. Maybe that was the purpose of the shootings. It was possible that the Unsubs were doing this just to lead us around on a wild goose chase while they were working on something bigger. If that were true, however, then what was the bigger picture? Why string along the police and the FBI rather than just go for it. Like 9/11, they could have gone for the big one first. Why this? Why make us run around?

None of my questions seemed answered by the time we got back to the field office. Kate and Hotch were trying to run through some theories, but I had tried to focus on putting the clues together myself. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to help. We got out of the car, and we were walking in, but I had nothing to contribute to their conversation. I think my silence was noted by Hotch, but he didn’t say anything to me about it.

As we waited for the elevator, Rossi, Morgan, and Brustin met up with us. They all started talking with Hotch and Kate about hypotheses, but I still didn’t get it. My whole “thing” was taking a quick look at something and being able to put it together with a snap of my fingers. I liked that it was my thing. Sometimes it meant that I would come to conclusions faster than Reid, and that was always a win in my book. But this case. These crime scenes. This Unsub. None of it was adding up, and I hated that I was falling short.

The elevator doors opened to Kate’s floor and we all stepped out.

“What do you have?” Hotch asked after noticing how Reid, Emily, and JJ were all crowded around a computer.

JJ looked up at us shortly before returning her gaze to the computer. “Garcia sent us the latest shooting.”

Emily played the video for us as we all gathered around them. Kate pushed herself between me and Hotch, earning a slight scoff from me and Morgan as we were shoved around. I rolled my eyes slightly, then looked down at the computer. As the footage played, we saw our victim, still unidentified, hailing for a cab with a hot dog in hand. Classic New York. A few moments later, just as a taxi was pulling up, a hooded man walked up with a gun in hand, shot the victim in the back of his head, and hurried off in a sprint.

I cocked a brow. That wasn’t very nonchalant of the Unsub. His whole thing was making this as casual as possible. So now, not only did he break M.O. by shooting with witnesses around, then leaving a card to taunt us, but now he was racing away? It didn’t feel like our guy, if I were being honest. Maybe it was a copycat, or maybe this was just another random shooting like New York saw all the time. Since we hadn’t identified the victim yet, it was possible that this was a gang hit, or maybe a hire to kill situation, or something along those lines. But it didn’t match up with our Unsub.

“Garcia says that they’re different heights, too,” Reid told us while Emily played back the video footage of the first shooting. Again, the differences were standing out. It was so obvious. “And their body types are different.”

“We’ve got more than one Unsub,” Hotch sighed, putting a palm on his forehead.

That changed our entire profile. We weren’t dealing with one guy who was politically motivated anymore. We were dealing with a duo who were trying to make a point of something. Duos were always easy to profile, though, which was a relief. In every duo case, there was a dominant and a submissive. Much like mine and Hotch’s relationship, the dominant had control over the submissive, but their connection and attraction was through their crimes— which, obvious, wasn’t like me and Hotch at all. The question in this case was which of them was the submissive and which of them was the dominant? Based on behaviors, it seemed like the first Unsub, the one who had performed the first six kills, was relaxed during the whole endeavor, which meant that he had confidence about what he was doing. On the other hand, the last kill was sloppy and rushed. If I were to guess, I would’ve said that the first Unsub was the dominant. He wanted to perform the murders because he got the most enjoyment out of them and because he knew how to do it properly; whereas the second Unsub, the submissive, seemed less sure about what to do and if doing it was right at all.

The big question now that the dominant/submissive profile was built was…  _ why _ ? Why were they doing this? My original hypothesis based on deductions formed around the profile of one Unsub told me that this was related to politics, but a duo killing at random changed things… And why would the submissive leave the Tarot card at the crime scene?

“Until we know why we’re doing this, we can’t get ahead of them,” Morgan said. “I think that we should get out on the streets. Increase police presence to force them into hiding while we try to build a stronger profile.”

“I only brought you here to create a profile, Agent Morgan. I don’t need your advice about what to do on the streets,” Kate responded calmly, though there was a bite to her words.

Morgan shifted on his feet. “I understand that,  _ Agent Joyner _ , and we’ll have the profile ready in the morning. However, I think that based on the profile we have as of now, the smart thing to do would be to—”

“I still didn’t ask, Agent Morgan. Thank you, but I won’t be tiring out our forces just for an overnight shift.”

“They’re targeting areas like 14 th Street, 42 nd , 59 th , 63 rd —”

“Morgan,” Hotch interrupted, “it’s not your call.”

Morgan glanced between me and Hotch, as though I’d give him backup on this. I didn’t know what to say or do, though. None of us did. The whole team was just standing there, listening to Morgan and Kate’s back and forth, and Hotch, with his boss tone, had to step in to diffuse the tension. I didn’t need to get mixed up in it. I didn’t need to choose between my best friend and my boyfriend. Hotch was right that this wasn’t Morgan’s call. We were asked in by Kate to consult, that was all. He tried to tell Kate what he thought was right, and if she didn’t want to hear it, then that was her choice. He didn’t need to argue with her about it.

“Take a walk for a bit,” Hotch offered quietly.

Morgan stared at me. “You’re not going to say anything?”

“Morgan—” I tried to explain, but he threw his hands up like he didn’t want to hear it, and he walked off.

I sighed, taking a defeated step back. Hotch and Kate both looked at me, but I didn’t look at them. Instead, I told Emily to play the two videos again so that we could get back to work. Morgan clearly didn’t want me to chase after him, so I wasn’t going to. Even though it made me feel like shit. If we were going to get these guys before they could kill again, then we needed to ignore distractions for a bit. I’d apologize to Morgan later. It would probably be a nasty argument, but I think he’d understand that I wasn’t about to choose between them while in front of the team and Kate. I wouldn’t choose between them anyhow. That wasn’t fair of him.

“I can’t stare at this any longer,” Emily sighed, giving up while moving out of the seat in front of the computer.

Hotch stood tall and crossed his arms. “We’re not finding anything new. I think it’s fair to say we’re all worn out after the long day we’ve had.” He looked to Kate, “I think it’s time to call it a night.”

She nodded. “Fair enough.”

“We’ll come back at seven in the morning to give our profile.”

Kate reached out for a hug to say goodnight, but Hotch dodged it just to give her a handshake. She awkwardly accepted his hand, then Hotch ordered the team to move out. Rossi and I exchanged a glance which said: “What the fuck?” as we all headed towards the elevators.

* * *

We all grabbed our go-bags from the trunks of our cars before heading into the hotel for the night. Emily, JJ, and Reid were talking ahead about the profile, meanwhile Morgan and Hotch were hanging back with me in silence. The three of us didn’t know what to say to each other. Morgan probably still felt stung by the fact that Hotch took Kate’s side and that I didn’t do anything to stand up for him. To be fair, though, Morgan was a big boy, and he could handle himself. He knew that he overstepped with Kate. He didn’t need me.

“JJ,” Reid croaked, coming to a stop.

I nearly ran into him when I noticed what he saw. The rest of the team took notice just as quickly, but we all stayed frozen in the lobby. JJ, however, perked up and hurried over to the lounge where Will was sitting, reading an article in the newspaper about the shootings we were working on. When he noticed that we were all standing there, he jumped to his feet so that he could hug JJ, who was running at him with full speed and force.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him as they parted.

“I tried goin’ to D.C., but when that didn’ work out, I took a train here to come see ya.” He bit his lip as he stared at her.

He was so in love with her. I wasn’t sure if anyone else could tell, or if even JJ and Will were aware, but he was absolutely head over heels for her. I could see it. I knew it because it was the same way Hotch looked at me. He looked at her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered, and that nothing could change the way he felt about her. She was one of the lucky ones. I hoped that she knew that.

“Detective,” Hotch greeted, sticking his hand out for Will after we all approached cautiously.

Will shook Hotch’s hand politely. “I’m sorry for showin’ up like this. I know that y’all are working. But, um…” He hesitated as he looked back at JJ. “I can’t stand you being on this case with what’s goin’ on.”

I furrowed my brows and looked at Hotch. Did he know what was going on and elected not to tell the team because JJ asked him not to? Telling by how confused he seemed, I could tell that he didn’t know what Will meant either. Especially when he asked, “Is there a problem?”

JJ slowly turned to face all of us. She gulped as she found the courage for what she wanted to say. “I’m pregnant.”

“And I’ve asked JJ to marry me,” he said to Hotch.

Hotch smiled and shook Will’s hand again. “Congratulations.”

My eyes brightened as I threw my arms around JJ after Emily hugged her. I whispered a thousand congratulations in her ear. This was  _ great _ news. We needed some good news, especially with how messy and dark our jobs were. A bright light like a baby was a gift and a half for us. I was so happy for her. While I didn’t realize that they were that serious, that didn’t stop me from hugging JJ as tight as I could and telling her that I was so excited for her and Will.

“We’ll give you two some privacy to sort things out, then,” Hotch said after JJ and I parted.

“Thank you, Hotch,” JJ said, hugging him shortly.

He smiled politely, but not like he was genuinely happy like the rest of us. He turned away to head for the elevators, and I started following him like it was an obligation, but JJ chased after him. When his attention was caught, he turned back to her and huffed, “You could have told me, JJ.”

“I know, Hotch,” she told him with lowered shoulders. “But you and Y/N—” She stopped herself. “I heard about what happened in St. Louis, and I didn’t want to… I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

I stiffened slightly. St. Louis felt like a lifetime ago. Back then, Hotch and I talked about having kids and if it were realistic for us. It turned into us having a string of arguments about it over the few days we were there, and, ultimately, I gave up because he seemed adamant on not talking about kids. He didn’t want to talk about it, let alone come to a conclusion, so I decided that he meant he didn’t want to have kids. At least not with me. And while that broke my heart into a million pieces, he tried to apologize and explain to me that he was just scared— but all that told me was that he was scared of having kids with  _ me _ .

JJ had stumbled into the room while we were having one of those arguments, but I thought that she didn’t hear anything or forgot about it entirely. I never thought in a million years that she would have kept something like this from us because she was worried about stirring up more arguments between me and Hotch. Of course I was excited for her. I thought Hotch would be, too… And maybe he was, but at the moment, he just looked disappointed that she felt like she couldn’t tell him what was going on. Even worse, she didn’t tell him, and he was letting her come out into the field, which wasn’t safe. He probably felt like shit. Meanwhile, I felt like shit because she felt like she couldn’t come to me, a friend, because she didn’t want her pregnancy to impact my relationship? What kind of sense did that make? Hotch and I were our own people. We made our own choices. If we fought, we fought. Fighting was healthy. Talking about our future was good. She shouldn’t have been afraid to talk to me. I was a horrible friend…

“We’ll see you in the morning,” Hotch said to her before turning again.

JJ and I stared at each other for a moment. We both looked sorry. “I’m so happy for you, JJ. He’ll come around. I promise.” I squeezed her shoulder quickly, then ran after Hotch who was holding the elevator for me.

When the elevator doors closed, Hotch snaked his arm around my waist and pulled me towards him so that our hips were touching. As I smiled lightly and hugged him by putting my palm on his chest, he kissed my temple and whispered that he loved me.

At our room, I sighed as I closed the door behind us. It had been an  _ incredibly  _ long day, but the good news we just received in the lobby made up for most of it. Hotch set his briefcase down on the desk, and I put my purse beside it. We both sighed again as we put our go-bags on the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed. I pulled off my shoes while he stared at the window for a bit. When my feet were finally free, I reached down to grab my pajamas from my go-bag. I started getting dressed as the deafening silence hung in the air.

“Do you ever think about it still?” Hotch asked, pulling off his shoes one at a time. I raised a brow. “Having kids, I mean. I know that we talked about it in St. Louis, and we said that we’d hold out, but… are there ever times when you think about it… or maybe… I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Regret the choice we made?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I mean, I know that we’ll talk about it again when we’re ready.”

“What if we’re ready now?”

I paused and looked at him. I asked myself what he meant by that, and if it was really what I thought it meant. I mean, there were a thousand different things he could have been insinuating, but I was scared to guess which one, or to take the words out of his mouth. We were obviously happy for JJ and Will, and baby fever was obviously a real thing, but I didn’t think that Hotch would ever let it get to him like this.

“I mean, would you even want to get married? I know that we said we’d wait to have kids for when it would make the most sense for us; and don’t you think that getting married first—”

“Aaron.”

I froze after saying his name to let the silence sit. I didn’t have to think about it. I knew what my answer would have been if he actually got around to asking me to marry him. Of course I’d marry him in a heartbeat. I would do the whole lavish wedding, or I’d do a spur of the moment, Vegas shotgun wedding where an Elvis Presley impersonator officiated it. I would have literally done anything to marry Aaron Hotchner. Whatever he wanted, I wanted. If he wanted to run away to Fiji and get married there, I would have booked the first flight. If he wanted to wait the appropriate two year engagement period, then have a wedding in a huge venue with all of our friends and family, I would have started saving up the money.

I didn’t need to think about marrying Hotch. I didn’t even need to think about having kids with him. He was the one in St. Louis who got all uptight about the prospect of it when I brought it up. If he thought that we were ready to get married and to have kids, then I was ready to ask him what the hell took him so long to come around.

“If you’d ever ask,” I began quietly, “I’d say yes.” I tied my hair back out of my face as I continued getting ready for bed, trying to break the tension in the room. I could tell that his eyes were following me, but I didn’t stop to take note. “But you can only ask if you do it properly and not while we’re on a case. Never, ever on a case. Do you hear me, Agent Hotchner?” I stopped long enough to see that he was grinning ear to ear while nodding. “Good.” I smirked as I headed towards the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face.

Hotch jumped up from the bed, took his shirt off, and joined me in the bathroom to get ready for bed, too. We both started with brushing our teeth, and nothing was said between us. I kept catching him watching me through the mirror, and I rolled my eyes a few times at him. His question was still echoing through my mind, and I was sure that my answer was racing through him. I loved him more than anything. Truly. But there were times when I’d ask myself why he would look at me like that. I always wondered a lot if St. Louis was proof of some kind that Hotch and I were ultimately doomed to fail, but then he brought up kids and marriage again tonight, and I knew that he meant it. But why?

I finished brushing my teeth and washing my face long before him, somehow. Still facing the mirror, my eyes avoiding his reflection, I spoke up with, “Can I ask you something?” Hotch’s reflection stared at me for a moment before he nodded slightly. “Why me?”

“I don’t understand.”

My gaze fell to the faucet in front of me. “I mean, why… why me, Aaron? What’s so… I don’t know…  _ appealing _ about me…”

Truth was, since first laying eyes on Kate, I couldn’t get over the fact that Hotch obviously had a type. Despite his insistence that nothing happened between them, there was still no denying that at one point or another, they had a spark, and some of that chemistry was still there. I asked myself that if I didn’t know Hotch, or if we weren’t dating, would he be with Kate? She looked so much like Haley, just like everyone had been whispering about all day. The fact that they had chemistry and she resembled his ex-wife, that would have been reason enough for him to seek her out once he was no longer with Haley, right? I mean, if I weren’t in the picture, maybe it would be her in the hotel room with him and not me.

I just didn’t understand how he could have a clear type, and then somehow end up with me. I tried to not be an insecure person considering I needed to have enough self-confidence to work in the field I was in, to take the chance of dating my boss, to bite back at Morgan and Reid playfully, and to stand up to Strauss when she was a pain in my ass. I needed to believe in myself or else I would fail in my career and personal life. But I was human, and sometimes I would look in the mirror, like I was doing just then, and I’d ask myself what Hotch saw in me. Why did he choose me? Why did he spend years silently passing by my office just to smile at me when he was married or, afterwards, when he could have had anyone else? Why me? What was so amazing about me that he could look me in the eyes and tell me that he loved me every day?

“Look at me,” he told me as he dropped his hairbrush on the counter. I reluctantly faced him. “I came alive when I finally met you. I saw colors for the first time. I could hear things I couldn’t hear before. I could feel things that I could never feel before. I look at you, and I see a lifetime of happiness waiting for me in your arms. When you first told me you love me, I could feel my heart restarting in my chest. I have lost a lot, Y/N… but meeting you… loving you… It’s the one constant I know I will have for the rest of my life. Every morning, I wake up and I look at you, and I think to myself that I got so damn lucky to find someone like you who loves me for me, while still encouraging me to do more, learn more, be more. I ask myself how anyone could come into my mess of a life and somehow choose to stick around, but somehow you do it. You continue to amaze me every single day when I see you at work, doing what you love, saving people’s lives. My heart melts every time I see you with Jack. My knees buckle every time you tell me you love me, and I swear I could listen to it forever.” He stepped closer to me and put his palms on my cheeks. “I look at you and I fall in love with you over and over again. I hold you in my arms and I think to myself that I should never let go because I’m so afraid that if I do, I might lose you somehow— and the thought of not getting to look at you every day, to hold you in my arms, to kiss your lips—” he dragged his thumb over my bottom lip— “to tell you that I love you every chance I can get… The thought of not having that with you because I might fuck something up… It terrifies me. You are the one person in the world who  _ gets _ me. That’s why it’s you. That’s why it will always be you. You once told me that you’d never stop fighting for me, is that still true?” I nodded, pressing into his touch lovingly. “I knew the day I met you that I would do anything for you. I know that I’ll always fight for you. I know that I’d even die for you. That’s why.”

Before I could respond, Hotch leaned in close and kissed me with a fiery passion that expressed every word he just said to me in a way that both of us could  _ feel _ . It was almost like his words were echoing through my body. I felt electric and on fire, all at the same time. I felt his love, warmth, and compassion with every second that passed by. Everything he said to me finally made sense when he kissed me, because I remembered that what he said was just as true for me as it was for him.

I loved Aaron Hotchner so much that it hurt sometimes. There were times when I would look at him and I would nearly cry because I was so happy, because I was so in love. No one had ever loved me like he did, and no one took the time to tell me  _ why _ . Most people would have brushed off my question or allowed it to spiral into an argument because they couldn’t actually think of something to say. But not Hotch. He knew exactly what to say.

I jumped onto my tip toes and started kissing him harder to let him know that I heard him, I believed him, and I felt it all for him, too. I’d fight and die for him. I loved him more than anything in the world. Nothing made me feel more alive than kissing him. Nothing made me feel more at home than his arms. Nothing was more loving and comforting than the way he said that he loved me. The tug in my chest towards his heart skipped a beat as I thought it. I loved him. I loved him so much. I couldn’t think about anything else but how much I loved him. There weren’t enough ways to tell him just how much I loved him. The words didn’t exist, and even if they did, I didn’t have enough time in life to tell him every piece of it. There were a million and one reasons to love Aaron Hotchner, but I loved him for a billion different reasons.

Hotch lifted me off the ground. I wrapped my legs around his hips, and with my sudden height over him, I used it to dominate our kiss shortly. He set me down on the counter and pushed me away with a gentle hand on my neck. “You meant it, baby?” he asked me quietly, pressing his forehead to mine. “You’d say yes?” He was so stupid sometimes, I swear. He couldn’t just take yes for what it was. “And… and the other thing…”

“Aaron,” I whispered against his nose, “I love you more than anything. I don’t want to lose you either. So what do you think?” I smiled in response to his smirk. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Does that answer it?”

“Say it again.”

“Yes.” I pecked his lips. “I’d say yes, Aaron Hotchner. I’d always say yes.”

He grabbed my hips roughly and pressed a sudden, breathtaking kiss against my lips. I tried to grab ahold of him before I could fall back against the mirror behind me. We both giggled against each other. I loved him… I wanted to scream it from the top of my lungs— which I was sure was what he planned on making happen within the next hour or so— and I never wanted to stop saying it. I loved Aaron Hotchner. I would marry Aaron Hotchner. I wanted to have kids with Aaron Hotchner. I wanted to devote my entire life and being to Aaron Hotchner. I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. Yes, yes, yes. Always.

* * *

At seven, half of the team was already set up at the police station to give the profile there, while the other half of us were at the FBI New York Field Office to deliver the profile to the Bureau workers. Since this was a joint task force operation, it was imperative that the NYPD was also aware of what we were looking for. That being said, I was glad that I didn’t draw the short stick on that one. Emily, Spencer, and Morgan had to go downtown to talk with them, meanwhile Hotch, Rossi, and I went to the field office. They were well behaved and good listeners. The NYPD, on the other hand… with how Morgan lost it last night, I did not pity them.

Delivering the profile was fairly textbook, but the profile itself was anything but that. It seemed like the team heeded my advice about the Unsubs’ intentions, because the profile we built around them relied heavily on the fact that they were politically motivated. There was some kind of bigger plan at play, though we weren’t sure yet what it was. That was why we needed everyone else’s help. We knew that because there were two Unsubs completing the tasks of these seemingly random murders, we were dealing with a dominant/submissive pair. Explaining that part to the field office was fairly textbook, however. Because of how they had planned and executed these attacks, it was easy to conclude that they were sophisticated and intelligent. Therefore, at least the dominant had a steady job—which was also why they were only hitting at certain times.

When we concluded delivering the profile to the agents in the field office, I saw Hotch pull Kate to the side to discuss putting more men on the street. When they left, everyone turned to me. The snickers that had been plastered to their faces yesterday morning when joking about how they  _ liaised _ together were now frowns and pouts of apologies. But I wasn’t jealous or upset. Not since last night. What Hotch and I discussed—what we practically  _ decided _ —made me over the moon happy. How could I be jealous of Kate anymore when I knew that Hotch wanted to marry me and he saw us living our whole lives together? I trusted him. I had to remind myself of that. The team didn’t know these new developments, however. All they knew was that all of yesterday, I looked miserable while thinking about what could have potentially happened between Hotch and Kate. But last night… “Magical” felt like a hyperbolic term or one alluding to Disney, which in itself felt overdramatic, but… last night… Hotch and I… There were honestly no words.

While everyone went to go back to work after giving me soft, apologetic eyes, I grabbed JJ’s hand and practically yanked her into the women’s bathroom. She tried protesting, but I didn’t relent. Once the door was closed behind us, I turned to her with a giddy smile that only made her urge for answers more prominent.

“Hotch and I talked last night,” I told her, making sure all of the stalls were clear. She was watching me like I was a crazy person. I turned to her with a wider smile once I was sure that we were alone. “I think he’s going to propose once we get home.”

JJ’s eyes widened, but not in a good way like I had for her last night. She seemed genuinely shocked and almost… disturbed. “What?” she scoffed.

I tried to maintain my smile. “Yeah. We talked last night, and I think you bringing up St. Louis again brought up a good point for us, JJ. We’re ready. We’ve always been ready, but we’ve just been scared.” I took her hands. “JJ, I think this is it. Seriously.”

“I—” she chuckled back another scoff as she carefully tore her hands away from mine. “I didn’t realize that you two were that serious.”

My smile finally faded. “What?”

“I mean…” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You guys have only been dating for, what, a year? And you were already talking about kids around the six months mark or so? And now you’re talking about getting  _ married _ ? Don’t you think you’re moving things a little fast?”

I took a defensive, defeated step away from her. “What?” I repeated like a broken record.

“Listen, Y/N, dating Hotch and seeing Jack  _ occasionally _ is one thing, but are you really willing to be Jack’s mother just as much as Haley is? Are you willing to spend more time with Haley for the sake of Hotch and Jack without making things awkward for them? Are you prepared for if Hotch makes a widow of you while on a case—or is he even prepared for if you make a widower of him? Have you considered any of this before taking the idea of marriage seriously?”

I thought that, of all people, JJ would get it. She hardly knew Will any longer than Hotch and I knew each other, and they were already having a kid together. Why was it that she got that opportunity freely, but I had to consider a thousand different things and jump through a million hoops to prove that I loved Hotch and that I would do anything for him? Yes, I was willing to be a mother to Jack—actually, I would have loved to be a mother to Jack. I practically already felt like I was. What was the difference in putting the actual label on it? And, of course I was willing to spend more time with Haley. There was obviously a cold shoulder feeling between us, but for the most part, we got along fairly well. If dealing with Haley meant being with Hotch and Jack, then, yes, I was willing to do that. And losing Hotch… No… I wasn’t ready for that. No one was ever ready for something like that. I was sure that Will and JJ weren’t even prepared for potentially losing each other. That wasn’t a fair jab on JJ’s behalf. It wasn’t. Losing Hotch was my worst nightmare. If anything bad ever happened to him, I’d die.

Before I could say anything to argue with JJ, there was a knock at the door. We both sighed off the tension as we looked away from one another. I cleared my throat. JJ opened the door slightly. I could see a sliver of Hotch’s silhouette, but he was keeping his back turned to not make it look like he was peeking into the women’s bathroom.

JJ looked at me slightly, “There’s another victim.”

I cursed under my breath. Before she could say anything else, I pushed past her and hurried out of the bathroom. Hotch and I brushed shoulders as I stormed out. I could sense that, behind me, Hotch and JJ were exchanging a glance where Hotch was asking for answers and JJ was shrugging off his gaze.

In the office space, I could hear that Morgan and Kate were fighting again. I wasn’t sure what was going on between them, but it was really starting to tick me off. There were a thousand reasons I should have been picking fights with Kate, but I knew that it wasn’t my place and there wasn’t time. I also talked to Hotch—you know,  _ as adults do _ , and we solved the issue before it could be blown out of proportion. Whatever was going on with Morgan needed to be resolved soon or I was actually going to smack some sense into him.

“We could’ve had that guy!” Morgan exclaimed. “If you and Hotch just listened to me last night, this wouldn’t’ve happened.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Even if we were on that platform, odds are that they would have targeted a different, less policed platform.”

“Yeah, well, at least that woman would still be alive.”

“Morgan,” Hotch said, coming up from behind me to step between them, “second-guessing isn’t going to do any of us any good right now—”

Morgan turned his attention. “Hotch, how am I supposed to look these cops in the eye and tell them that we’re here to help?”

“You’re not. We’re here to give the profile, that’s all.”

“I said to put us at express stops. 14 th , 42 nd , 59 th , 63 rd . That’s exactly where they hit!”

“It’s not your place to have this discussion or make this decision, Derek!”

“My place?” Morgan scoffed. “ _ My place _ , Hotch? Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

“You need to back off. You need to stay focused here and not let your emotions get in the way.”

Morgan chuckled. “That’s funny, Hotch. Focused. From where I’m standing, all of your focus has been on her,” he pointed at Kate.

Kate rolled her eyes, Hotch bit the inside of his cheek, and I sighed to myself while trying to practically hide behind Rossi. I didn’t want to get mixed up in any of that. Morgan had a short fuse since coming to New York. Whatever possible reason there was for it, I needed to wait until he was cooled down to confront him about it. As for what he said about Hotch and Kate, he wasn’t necessarily wrong. Yes, Hotch was going out of his way to stand up for Kate, even though it wasn’t his job to. I supposed that should have made me mad, but I couldn’t focus on anything besides what JJ said to me in the bathroom. I confided in her as a friend. I thought that she would have been excited for me, yet I was only met with skepticism. I hated it.

“Take a walk. Now,” Hotch said quietly and angrily.

Morgan huffed, giving up on fighting with Hotch again. He didn’t look at me as he turned towards the elevators so that he could catch some of that “fresh” New York City air. There was silence for the longest time in the office. Kate was watching Hotch, but he was watching me, and I was watching JJ. We all had different things on our minds, and none of it had to do with the case. Great. How were we supposed to save people like this? How were we supposed to put our jobs first when Kate clearly still had feelings for Hotch, and he was worried about me and the conversation we had last night, all the while I was mad at JJ for what she said. And then there was Morgan… Morgan was mad at practically all of us. He was mad at Kate for who knew what, he was mad at Hotch for defending her over him, he was mad at me for not having his back, and he was mad at the rest of the team for not taking a side.

“Kate,” Hotch whispered, nodding towards her office. She caught his hint and followed him there.

The rest of us stood around, completely clueless as to what we should do. Normally, we would head down to the crime scene to investigate, but that system had proven to be useless over the past couple of murders. More was getting done around the office than the crime scenes. But not this time. It felt like we were always in the wrong place. Maybe Morgan really did have a point. If Hotch and Kate had just listened to him, this wouldn’t have happened—or maybe it still would’ve happened, but at least we would’ve had cops on the streets to try and stop the Unsub, or maybe someone on the team could race to the crime scene to tell us if it were worth taking a look at or not. But now we had nothing. Kate and Hotch were talking privately and the rest of us were doing fuck all.

It didn’t take long for them to talk, however. Hotch opened the door to her office again, ushering her through, and then they met us back in the office space.

“We’re going to be putting all of our forces on the streets today,” Kate announced to everyone.

“ _ Now _ ?” I questioned. We had no proof that they would hit more than once in one day. What was the point of taking Morgan’s advice now? It would have been better if they just waited until tomorrow.

Kate squinted at me. “Yes. Now. We’ll all pair up, taking different streets and stations where we anticipate their next attack. Even if they won’t strike again today, it’s very likely that they’ll be scouting their next targets, which means that they’ll stick out like sore thumbs. Our job today is to look for people out of place and to question them. That’s all.”

I scoffed quietly and looked at Hotch. Now I know how Morgan felt “I’ll go with Derek, I guess.” I threw my hands up in disbelief of what I was seeing and hearing. I couldn’t believe Hotch was agreeing to this. We could’ve been staying to work on the profile instead of stalking the streets for no reason.

So while everyone quietly started pairing up, they kept an eye on me as I headed for the elevator. When I reached the lobby, I saw Morgan pacing angrily, hitting the wall with his foot every time he ran into one. When he spotted me, though, he stopped pacing, and his face softened a bit. My face was still hot with the anger that was building in my chest. Morgan’s frustration was rubbing off on me and I didn’t exactly appreciate it.

“Let’s go,” I huffed, walking straight past him. He followed on my heels. “Kate’s finally putting everyone out on the street.”

“You’re kidding,” he chortled.

“We’re all one step behind these two Unsubs, yet Kate seems about three steps behind us. I don’t understand why Hotch trusts her so much.”

“Their history?”

I shook my head as we pushed through the front doors of the building. “I asked him about it, and he told me that nothing ever happened between them.”

“Be that as it may, but they still have  _ some _ kind of feelings for each other. She definitely likes him more, and I’m not saying he likes her like that, but… There was something there at some point, Y/N, and that’s all getting dragged up again.”

“I get that,” I said when we reached the SUV on the road that we were going to take to our assignment. “But that still doesn’t excuse his ignorance.”

“I know.”

We got in the car and I told Morgan where we were headed.

* * *

We were sitting in the car for a few hours, scanning the road, watching pedestrians as they passed by. Morgan and I chatted a bit about stuff outside of work because that was clearly a sore, irritating topic for us both. Unfortunately, there was a good hour or so where I had to hear about some of his hookups. Every detail. I think he forgot that just because we were best friends didn’t exactly mean I needed to hear about how many women he could sleep with in one night. I mean, hey, I was glad he trusted me with that information, but there were some things that were better unsaid.

“What’s going on with you?” I asked quietly. Morgan looked at me suddenly. “Why are you and Kate arguing all the time?”

Morgan sighed. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. She’s got you all riled up. For what?”

His grip tightened on the steering wheel out of frustration. “Hotch told me something yesterday.” I cocked a brow. “The Bureau’s going to fire Kate if she doesn’t close this case with a ribbon on top.”

“Okay. So? Why should you care? Do you like her or something?”

He shot me a glare. “No. If she’s kicked out, I’m at the top of her replacement list.”

My heart dropped to my stomach. That was why he was challenging authority. He could see the position in his future. He saw that he could potentially be running the New York Field Office soon, and he was letting it get to his head. The whole point of our job was that we weren’t supposed to let emotions get in the way, but he was doing the exact opposite, almost like he was hoping that Kate would fail. Obviously, we didn’t want this pair of Unsubs to keep killing, but… he wanted that job. And I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want him to leave us—to leave me, but it was a good fucking opportunity. If he ended up getting the job offer for one reason or another, I’d have to let him go, even though it would kill me. He was my best friend. He was my partner in the field. I didn’t know how to do this without him. But if I had to, then I had to. That was life.

“Morgan—”

“Garcia! We’ve got an officer down!” Emily shouted into the comms. Morgan immediately pressed his foot onto the gas pedal while l turned on the lights and sirens. “16 th West of Union Square!”

We weren’t very far from 16 th . I mean, in New York traffic, we were pretty far; but with the lights and sirens on, we moved somewhat faster through the crowd of cars. Morgan weaved his way through, honking at every car that refused to move, cursing at every pedestrian that was in our way, cursing to himself that we weren’t getting to Emily faster. This was what he wanted, though. He told Kate we should put cops on the streets. Yet look what happened. Cooper went with Emily, and she called it in, but what were we supposed to do if we found Emily lying on the concrete, too? I don’t think either of us would be able to handle it.

As we approached 17 th , I could see the crowd surrounding an alleyway just on 16 th . Morgan made a turn and sped up to them to see what was going on. While he slowed down, I popped my door open and jumped out, running with the momentum of the car a bit to make sure I wouldn’t fall flat on my face. I pushed through the crowd of pedestrians, calling out: “FBI! Move!” while shoving them around. When I got through, I saw them. Emily was crouched over Cooper, and there was an Unsub about ten feet away from them, bleeding out.

I cursed under my breath and ran to the Unsub, pulling off my jacket so that I could use it to put pressure on his wounds. He couldn’t die. We needed him. He was our only chance of getting answers. But he wasn’t conscious. He was breathing, yet he wasn’t awake. If we could keep him alive long enough, to keep the two bullet wounds in his chest at bay for just a few more hours, we could get answers.

I pressed onto my jacket on his chest with both of my palms. I was trying to stop the bleeding until the paramedics could arrive, but he was already bleeding through the fabric of my jacket. I didn’t know what else to do. The ambulances were close—I could hear their sirens just a few blocks away. But I didn’t know what else to do. With all the blood he lost… And then he started to crash. My breath hitched before I started performing CPR in a panic. We couldn’t lose him. We just couldn’t.

He suddenly woke up with a gasp. As his eyes adjusted to the sunlight, he tried to wiggle around, but I held him still to make sure he wouldn’t cause anymore internal harm. He looked up at me. “Let me die.”

I froze. I wasn’t going to let him die. No. “What’s your name?”

“Let me die…”

“No,” I answered quickly. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Ma’am, we’ll take it from here,” a paramedic said, racing up behind me. I didn’t even realize that they had already made it. So I moved back, letting them get to work since they could do more than I could. “Step away,” he insisted, pointing to the end of the alleyway.

I nodded silently, then slowly turned on my heels. As I slowly started making my way out of the alley, I glanced over my shoulder to get a look at the Unsub one last time. He was just a kid… seventeen or eighteen, maybe. He didn’t look like the type of submissive or dominant to be running around these streets. He just looked like any normal kid. So why? The dominant wouldn’t have gotten caught, and he didn’t fit the description of the submissive. So… what was going on?

“Are you okay?” Morgan asked worriedly, running up to a shell shocked Emily. She nodded slightly. “Is he going to make it?” We all looked at the ambulance where they were loading up Cooper to take him to the hospital.

Her gaze fell to the ground. “I— I don’t… I don’t know.”

I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. “You okay, kid?” Rossi asked me.

I didn’t say anything. That kid down there was going to die because I couldn’t do more… How was I supposed to live with that? I could shoot an Unsub, no problem, but trying to save a kid? It didn’t make sense why it was hitting me so hard. It shouldn’t have mattered. He should have been any old Unsub. But he was a kid… Hotch and I were talking about having kids… What if someone shot our— No.

“Let me get you something to wipe this off,” Rossi said, pointing to my bloody hands. He snapped at Reid, a signal to find a rag or something. “What happened?” he asked me, trying to get me to focus on something.

I shook my head. “I… Morgan and I got here afterwards… Emily… She…” I looked up at him as Reid returned with a rag and started gently wiping the blood off my hands. “He’s just a kid, Rossi. He doesn’t match the descriptions of our Unsubs.”

“You think that this is an unrelated, isolated case?” Reid inquired.

I glanced between him and my hands. The fucking blood wasn’t coming off. It was still wet, and it should have been wiped away with ease, but it was still there, drying, taunting me. I had a kid’s blood on my hands. “No,” I answered him quietly. “It’s the same; I just don’t understand how.” I shyly looked at Rossi. “He wanted me to let him die.”

Rossi’s face relaxed, almost like something important occurred to him. “I think we have a serious fucking problem,” he cursed under his breath. Reid stopped wiping my hands clean. When I looked down again, though, it didn’t look like he made any progress, so I started scratching at it. “We have multiple Unsubs, they’re willing to die— according to Y/N— they’re using counter-surveillance, there seems to be a hierarchy, a random thirst for blood, a need to create chaos amongst the masses—”

“Terrorists,” I mumbled.

“Exactly.”

“What do we have?” Hotch asked, running up to us with Kate hot on his heels.

Still scratching at my hands to get the blood off, I answered, “Cooper’s headed to the hospital, the Unsub’s too unstable to transport right now—”

“Do they think he’ll make it?” Kate inquired.

I stared at her for a moment before shaking my head. I continued talking to Hotch, “There’s a problem, though. This guy’s a third Unsub, and he begged me to let him die, Hotch. We were just talking about it…” I trailed off, unsure of how to proceed while still focusing on the damn blood that wouldn’t come off my hands.

Reid took over after noticing my awkward silence. “We think these guys might be terrorists.” Everyone’s posture changed. “The murders simulate bombings. Typically, with terrorist bombings, there’s one, less lethal bombing to gauge police response times, then there will be another bombing on another day with a second bombing to follow suit once the emergency responders get there. The targets are usually civilians for the test bombing and the first bombing so as to create chaos. The second bombing, however, is the main focus of the attacks, and that’s because attacking emergency responders is, in a way, attacking the government and the system itself. Today, what we saw was that plan finally being enacted. They’ve been test running with the past few shootings in order to get our attention, which is also what the Tarot card was for, and once they knew that they had first responders on the street, they went for it. If Emily didn’t shoot the Unsub, he would’ve shot her.”

I looked at the blood on my hands again to notice that it was gone. My palms were all red from scratching them up, but the blood had been gone ever since Reid wiped it away, and I hadn’t noticed. Something about how Reid mentioned that the Unsub lying on the ground probably seven feet away from us would’ve killed Emily made me suddenly less empathetic.

“This is the bigger play here, Aaron,” Rossi said. “This is what we’ve been missing.”

Hotch’s phone started ringing. He glanced at the caller ID first to see if it were something he could ignore while we were talking about a potential terror attack. It must have been important because he answered it and put it on speaker. “Garcia?”

“Sir, we’ve got a problem. I’ve been looking through all the cameras since the last shooting, and they’ve all been hacked into. That’s how they’ve been watching us. That’s how they’ve been ahead of us this entire time.”

“How did we not catch that sooner?”

“It was system wide. I had to check camera by camera to be sure.”

Hotch sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Garcia.” He hung up on her. “This isn’t just a theory anymore. If the shootings were just a test, there’s going to be something big.”

Hotch put his phone away in his pocket. “Morgan and Y/N, head to Homeland Security to discuss raising this to a terrorist watch level. It’s…” He hesitated. “It’s possible that there will be a bombing  _ soon _ .”

“Morgan, you have bomb experience, so I want you to head this if it comes to that point,” Kate said. Morgan, Hotch, and I all seemed shocked. “If that’s alright with you.”

Morgan nodded. “Sure.”

Before jumping onto our toes so that we could hurry back to our car, Hotch stopped us to make sure that we would stay in contact. These guys were going after first responders and they were watching us. We had to consider that we were all targets. Morgan and I agreed. Then we hurried off. The second we were in our seats, Morgan started driving off. Neither of us had our seatbelts on.

The sun was already starting to set, which meant that it would be dark soon, and that we were running out of time. If this really was as bad as we figured it was, then it meant that a bomb could go off at any point. It could have happened before, during, or after our meeting with Homeland Security, and then what? The whole city would go under lock down, our whole team separated. It wasn’t ideal. So we had to race to convince Homeland Security that this was a real, viable threat.

My phone buzzed with a call that I picked up as soon as I could, not even bothering to look at the caller ID. “Greenaway,” I answered.

“Hey,” Hotch greeted, “I just wanted to let you know that Kate and I are heading back to the field office right now. When you and Morgan are done at Homeland, meet us there before we head to the hotel for the night.”

“Okay. Sounds good. I’ll let Morgan know.”

“Thanks. I love you.”

That caught me off guard for a moment, but I tried not to overthink it. It probably had to do with trying to prove to me and himself that nothing happened with Kate— at least nothing that mattered— or that our conversation last night shouldn’t matter, or maybe it really was just an accident. Either way, I returned the favor before hanging up and tossing my phone in the cup holder.

“What was that about?” Morgan inquired.

“Hotch wants us to meet up with him and Kate at the office before going back to the hotel for the night.”

“Did he say why?”

I shook my head. “I figure it’s probably just to review our meeting with Homeland Security, and then we’ll be set loose.”

“Hopefully. I’m exhausted.”

“I could use a drink.” I threw my head back against the headrest.

“What’s been up with you today?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the road. I raised a brow. “Come on, Greenaway. I know when something’s wrong with you.”

“How—”

“Don’t ask because I won’t tell you how I know. But, seriously, what is it?”

“Did JJ tell you?” I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.

He looked over at me. “No. But now you’ve piqued my interest.”

I silently cursed myself for saying anything at all. If I would have just kept my mouth shut, I could have denied that something was wrong, or I could have just avoided the topic altogether by not saying anything until we would get to the Homeland Security office. But now Morgan definitely wasn’t going to leave it alone. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to discuss Hotch with Morgan. I knew that Morgan loved me and he was glad that we were happy with each other… but after what JJ said, I was scared to talk about it with anyone else. I thought that, of all people, JJ would have understood; yet she took my heart in her hand and practically squeezed it into dust. I didn’t want Morgan to give me the same pessimistic opinion.

I let out a quiet sigh and stared at my sweaty palms. “Hotch and I talked last night about getting married and having kids.” I waited, trying to gauge if Morgan would protest just yet. He didn’t react, though. “I told him that I’d marry him in a heartbeat, and I’d have kids with him whenever. I mean… that wasn’t exactly what was said, but that was the gist of it… I was really excited about it, though, Derek. I felt like Hotch and I were on the same page about it, and I even figured that once this was all over with, he might even propose…” I hesitated when I saw his grip on the steering wheel tense. My shoulders fell in defeat. “JJ thinks we’re rushing and should hold off on making any big decisions like that.”

“I agree with JJ,” he insisted quickly before I could continue.

I felt my heart sink in my chest. My worst fear had been realized. It didn’t matter how happy anyone on the team was for me and Hotch, they didn’t understand why we were already talking about getting married a year into our relationship. Morgan would always give me shit for dating Hotch, but I thought that it was always because of the age difference, or the fact that he was my superior. But I never stopped to think that it was because he thought that Hotch and I weren’t actually that serious. We were. I couldn’t imagine my life with anyone else but Hotch. Of course I wanted to marry him and have a family with him. Why wait if we knew that it was what we wanted? What was the point of dancing around it? I was serious about it, Hotch was serious about it… Why could no one else seem to understand that?

Morgan took notice of my silence, so he decided to backpedal and explain himself. “You know I love you, sunshine, but… Come on. I know that things seem really good, and they probably are because you’re still technically in the honeymoon stage of your relationship, but I don’t want you to jump the gun on this and get hurt like Haley got hurt. Hotch is different around you, there’s no denying it. I just worry that he might wake up one day and realize that he doesn’t want to be this new person anymore. He might want to be who he’s always been. And if that happens, I don’t want you to get hurt because of it. It’s easy to wiggle out of a situation like that when you have no legal ties. But look at Haley. She wanted out, yet she’s still tied to him. If you get married, or if you have kids, and things fall apart, what are you going to do? Stick around like Haley does? Stay in the BAU and pretend like nothing happened?” He looked over at me, reading the disappointed look I was wearing, and he grabbed my hand. “I want what’s best for you. If you really think you’re ready for the next steps, then I can’t stop you. But maybe you should just think about it a little longer—”

My phone started ringing. I thanked literally every higher power imaginable from saving me from hearing the rest of that. And, honestly, Morgan was probably relieved, too. It seemed like he was rambling in order to try and save his rapport with me, but it wasn’t helping. I knew that he meant well. I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was just looking out for me. But I really wanted his support on this when JJ wouldn’t give it. I felt like if even one person could be happy for us, then that was good enough for me. But Hotch and I cared too much about our team and what they thought of us to not take into account how they each felt about us. If there was any chance that our relationship was going to impact the team, they had every right to know about it beforehand in the same way Jack and Haley deserved to know.

“Garcia?”

“Oh, my god, you’re okay,” she sighed with relief.

I raised a brow and put the call on speaker so that Morgan could listen in. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“You haven’t heard?”

Morgan and I shared a look of confusion. “Penelope, what happened?” Derek asked this time.

“I—Wh—” She sniffled.

“Penelope,” he insisted, getting worried.

“There was a bomb in one of the cars. I don’t know where anyone is, I don’t know who took which car, I don’t know who’s okay, I don’t—”

“Woah, woah, woah, baby girl. Calm down. Use your words. Explain what happened.”

We heard Garcia take in a deep, calming breath. “There was a bomb in one of the SUVs.”

“Where?”

“Just outside of the field office.”

I nearly dropped my phone. Hotch called me from the car he and Kate were in on their way to the field office. He told us to meet him there. He— He was in one of those SUVs. I just heard from him— It couldn’t be him, right? Right… Please. My head started to spin.

“Have you heard from Hotch?” Morgan asked for me.

“I haven’t heard from anyone. You guys are the first ones I called. I didn’t know what else to do—”

“Calm down. It’s going to be alright. Call my phone and keep me on the line while you try to get ahold of everyone else. Y/N’s going to call Hotch, alright?”

I silently thanked him for knowing me well enough to know that I would want to be the one to call Hotch. He probably understood that I was fearing the worst, thinking that it was Hotch and Kate in that bombing. He knew that I’d be desperate to get off the phone with Garcia so that I could get ahold of Hotch. I thanked him for knowing me like that. I thanked him for being my friend who looked out for me. Even if he was an asshole only a minute ago.

“Okay,” Garcia agreed. She hung up the call on my phone, and moments later, Morgan’s phone started to ring.

As he answered, I started dialing Hotch’s number. It started ringing. One. Beat. Two. Beat. Three. Beat. Four. Beat. Five. Beat. Click.

“You’ve reached Aaron Hotchner. Leave your name and message and I’ll get back to you when I can.”


	26. BOMB AND A BARRICADE BETWEEN US

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Talk of murder, shooting. terrorism, mention of bombing-- literally everything Criminal Minds. Panic attack(s), anxiety, PTSD, shock, etc.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 4 Episode 01. Right after part twenty-five.

_ And I’ll get back to you when I can. _

His voice rang in my ears as I kept trying to call him over and over again. Every time I heard that first click, followed by: “You’ve reached—”, I would hang up and start over. He had to pick up eventually. He had to answer me soon. I refused to believe that something happened to him. I knew Aaron Hotchner, and I knew that there was no way in hell he was going to leave me without saying goodbye. This was all a big misunderstanding. Hotch and Kate probably hadn’t even reached the field office yet. His phone was probably dead or something. Or maybe he was preoccupied on the phone with someone else who had called him from the Bureau or otherwise, searching for answers as to what the hell just happened. It was going to be fine. Hotch was going to be fine. We were going to be fine.

My phone slipped out of my hand as I tried to dial his number again.

I let out a quiet sob as I tucked my chest forward, blindly searching for my phone by my feet on the floor. Morgan was still on the phone with Garcia as she tried to reach everyone else. Rossi and Reid were the first to get in contact with her. They told us that they had already left the field office to head to the hotel for the night by the time they heard about the bombing. When they tried to turn around to help, they were redirected to another office, since that was protocol. I knew that there was a chance that when Morgan and I would get there, we would be turned around, too, but I had to know. I had to see for myself if it was Hotch and Kate or anyone else. If Hotch wasn’t going to pick up his damn phone and tell me where the hell he was, I was going to tear apart the remains of the car until I found answers.

“Is everyone okay?” Emily asked as she immediately picked up Garcia’s call.

I felt my heart and hope sink again, even as I found my phone on the ground. We knew where Garcia, Reid, Rossi, and Emily were… All that was left was JJ and Hotch… According to Emily, JJ was at the hotel with Will, which meant that she was nowhere near the field office. Still, we needed to call her and make sure. So while they discussed JJ, I dialed Hotch again.

“You’ve reached—”

My hands were shaking, and I could hardly see the phone screen through my tears. Not Hotch. Please. Please. Not him. No.

_ Pick up the fucking phone, asshole. Pick it up. Stop being so damn stubborn. Hang up the call you’re on with whoever the hell it is who called you. I don’t care if it’s the fucking president. Pick up the phone, Aaron. If your phone is dead, plug it in. I swear— If you let it die for the first time in years on the one night when I needed to just hear your voice and make sure you’re okay— _

“I’m headed to another critical command post right now,” Emily said.

That was probably what was going to happen to me and Morgan. When Rossi and Reid tried to get to the field office, they were told to go to one of the posts away from the office, and Emily was being sent to another. We were being split up on purpose because we were clearly the targets, so having us all together was too dangerous. Morgan and I were inevitably going to be sent to another post, and I was going to be useless just sitting in a chair, dialing Hotch’s phone over and over again.

“I’ll talk to the agent in charge when I get there,” Emily continued. “Maybe they’ll be able to reach Kate—”

And then the call went dead on her end.

I looked up at Morgan. He shrugged, unsure of what happened.

“Penelope, what happened to Emily?” he asked.

“I— I don’t know— She just—"

And then that call went out, too.

“Derek—” I croaked, still trying to redial Hotch  _ again _ .

“It’s going to be alright.”

I recognized his lying voice. He wasn’t good at hiding it from me. I knew what his tells were just as well as he knew mine. He knew that something was off about me earlier in the same way that I knew that something was off about him now. He didn’t believe that everything was going to be alright. Neither of us did. Not as long as Hotch wasn’t answering his phone.

We turned the corner onto the street where the FBI’s main New York City field office was. Morgan came a sudden stop before we could collide with a parked ambulance just in front of us. I put my arm out against the glove box, stopping myself from whipping my head against it. When we were still, I looked up to take a look around. There were dozens of police cars, ambulances, SWAT trucks, and bomb squad vehicles parked around in a tight cluster, but none of them seemed to be thrusting into action.

Morgan turned off the car and jumped out. I pushed the passenger’s side door open and didn’t even bother closing it. Morgan and I ran up to the crowd of policemen standing around behind a barricade. From where we were, I could see a car on fire past the barricade, on the right side of the road. Everyone was just standing around, staring, and talking; yet none of them were  _ doing _ anything.

Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? Why was there a barricade? Where was Hotch? Whose car was that out there? Why was everyone standing around!

I wanted to scream and push them all forward.

Morgan stepped up and started asking around for the man in charge, and one of the officers directed him over to a large man who was talking with the head of the SWAT team. While he was busy with that, I was just trying to push past the crowd, trying to find the front of the barricade. As I found the front of the crowd, I could see down the street and could get a clearer view of the car that was on fire. It was definitely one of the FBI’s classic black SUVs, but it was just a question of who was in it.

“Officer down! Please, send help!” someone screamed in the distance.

“Morgan!” I practically shrieked, pointing to Hotch in the middle of the road. He was sitting with a kid beside Kate’s body, but I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. Morgan came running to my side. “He’s out there.” I started running towards the barricade, but an armed man put on patrol there aimed his gun at me. I flashed my badge. “FBI. Move.”

“No one’s allowed past. This area’s restricted.”

“What?”

The man who was in charge, the same one who told Morgan that we couldn’t go through, stepped up to us. “We were told by the FBI that first responders are the real targets. Our orders are to not let anyone through until the bomb squad can clear it.”

I looked to Morgan desperately. We needed to help Hotch and Kate.

“Please, that’s our boss,” Morgan told him.

“Help us! Please! Someone! Anyone!” Hotch called out again.

“Hotch!” I called back, pushing against the front of the SWAT agent’s gun. I didn’t care if he was threatening to shoot me. I knew that he wouldn’t actually do it. “Aaron!” I cried.

Morgan was still pleading with the man in charge to let us through while I was fighting to get past the barricade.

“Y/N!” Hotch yelled back. My heart fell to my stomach and started doing somersaults. “Send a medic! She’s going to die! Someone! Please! We’re here! We need help!”

“Aaron!” I was still pushing against the gun, feeling how it pressed against my chest so hard I was sure to have a bruise in the morning. I didn’t care, though. I wanted to get to him. I wanted to help him. I wanted to hold him.

“Go, go, go,” Morgan told me, pushing us around the SWAT agent after we finally got permission to go through.

I started sprinting toward Hotch. My feet pounded against the pavement, and I could feel every beat of my heart and every ounce of strength it took just to breathe. I felt everything as I got closer to Hotch and saw how much he was bleeding. I nearly tripped over myself as I was almost to him, too eager to be at his side and to make sure that he was alright.

“Hotch,” I cried, every inch of me shaking as I fell to my knees beside him. He didn’t turn to me, though. His hands were buried under Kate’s back and he was still fighting to get her to wake up. I put my hands on his cheeks and made him look at me, “Are you alright?”

“She’s going to die,” he croaked. He forcefully pulled his face away from my hands so that he could look back at Kate. “I don’t even know what happened. I found her like this…”

He didn’t know what happened? How could he not know? He was right there when it happened. His face and body were all scraped up. His head was fucking bleeding. How could he not fucking know? Was it amnesia? Maybe just the shock coursing through his veins? Why wouldn’t he just look at me?

“They’re not letting anyone through here until they clear the area,” Morgan said. “Can we carry her there?”

Hotch shook his head vigorously. “Please help us…” he cried. “Please…”

The kid that was with Hotch, helping him control Kate’s incessant blood loss, shuffled on his feet so that he could get a better angle on holding her back together.

“We’re trying, bud, but you’ve gotta work with us. They’re not going to send any first responders down here.”

“Baby…” I mumbled, trying to hold him again. “We need to carry her.”

“We can’t. We already tried,” he croaked.

I looked up at the kid who was with us still. “You need to get out of here. Now.” His eyes shifted between me and Hotch for a moment. “Now!” I yelled in his face. There was no reason for a kid to be there. If he wanted to help, the best thing he could do was head back over to the barricade and keep asking for help.

The kid stood, pulling his bloody hands away from Kate, and ran off.

My attention turned back to Hotch. “The three of us can carry her.”

“No,” he cried, “she’ll bleed out.”

“She’ll bleed out here, too, if we don’t at least try.”

Morgan’s phone rang and he immediately answered it. “Garcia, we’ve got Hotch and Kate— but, listen, you’ve gotta get someone to come into this barricade right away or Kate’s going to die.” He paused for a moment to listen to Garcia. “What?” He sounded so confused. “Are you sure?” the panic returned to his voice. He looked up at me, “The kid— The kid, Y/N! The kid’s the bomber!” He hung up the phone. “Stay here with Hotch,” he commanded me before jumping to his feet and running after the kid who had just been with us moments ago to help.

“Y/N,” Hotch cried, finally peeling his eyes away from Kate to look at me. He was crying so hard. My heart broke. “Do something… Please…” His eyes ran wild, desperate to find something to focus on. “Where— Where are we?”

“Hotch…” I whispered.

Something was very wrong with him. What was it?

I fucking wished that there were more I could do. He was begging, pleading, and crying to me for help— Help which I couldn’t give. Kate was going to die on that street because none of the medics on the other side of the barricade had the balls to come help them.

Just then, as if all of our cries, pleas, and prayers had been finally heard, an ambulance started approaching with its lights and sirens on. Someone was coming. We were going to get help. We were going to be fine. Kate was going to be okay. Hotch was going to get help. Someone would finally be able to tell me what the hell was wrong with him. I needed to know if it was just shock, and if it wasn’t, was it amnesia, was it that he hit his head so hard that he was going to have other health issues connected to this one injury? Please…. No. Not him. Please. Help us. Help. Please. I needed them to tell me what was wrong. I needed answers soon or I was going to die.

The ambulance slowed down, and one medic jumped out of the driver’s seat. Where the hell was the rest of his team? Why was it just him? Why had no one else come to help us? Please! Someone! Help!

As the EMT kneeled beside us with his bag, Hotch started explaining what he knew—or at least thought he knew. I couldn’t believe he even knew how to say the words “She’s got an arterial bleed in her back” when he couldn’t even remember where he was or what he was doing there.

“I’ve been putting pressure on it,” Hotch said. He was so calm. How the hell was he so calm now when he had only just been crying and screaming for help? Did we switch bodies? Why was I the panicked one now and he was able to speak eloquently. What the hell happened to him? “She passed out about five minutes ago.”

The EMT put his fingers on Kate’s pulse. “I’m gonna need both of your guys’ help, alright?” he asked us as he started digging around in his bag. Hotch and I both nodded.

“Why is no one else coming?” I questioned, holding back a sob.

“The area’s still not clear. You were calling for help and I just couldn’t listen anymore.” He wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Kate’s arm. “My partner refused to come out here with me.”

I looked at Hotch as he leaned down to press his forehead against Kate’s. I didn’t even feel jealousy wash over me like it had been over the past day or so. I watched him whisper to her that everything was going to be alight and that she was going to get out of there alive, and all I could feel was my heart wrenching in my chest over and over again.

“Alright,” the medic said, grabbed clamps from his bag, “I need you two to roll her onto her side on my mark. I’m going to clamp the artery shut. Sir, when I tell you to move, you need to get out of my way as fast as possible. Understand?”

“Yes,” Hotch and I answered simultaneously.

“Okay. On my mark.” He shuffled around on his knees so that he could squeeze between me and Hotch for the best angle of Kate’s back. “One, two, three.” Hotch and I groaned as we carefully turned Kate onto her said. The medic prepped the clamp, getting it as close to Kate’s back as he could while Hotch still had his hand buried in there. “Move.” Hotch pulled his hand out of Kate’s back, and the medic shoved the clamp in as fast as he could. He sighed with relief. “Ma’am, I need you to grab the IV bag of fluids. Sir, I need you to get the gurney from the bus.”

Hotch and I both stumbled to our feet to do as we were told. As I scurried over to the EMT’s medical bag to find what he was talking about, Hotch limped his way over to the back of the ambulance. He was hardly putting pressure on his right foot— he was practically hopping. So not only was his head hurt, but his leg was… well… there could have been a hundred different things wrong with his leg… and yet, he was still trying to run around in order to help Kate.

I handed the needle end of the IV to the medic, and he carefully stuck it into Kate’s arm. Hotch came limping back with the ambulance’s gurney in hand. “Now for the tough part,” the EMT said to us as Hotch crouched down. “You two need to  _ carefully _ slide her onto the gurney, making sure to keep her on her side. Got it?” We nodded. “Okay. Put it as close to her as you can.” Hotch pushed the gurney up to Kate. “Ma’am, grab her hips; Sir, grab her shoulders.” We did as we were told. “One, two, three.” Hotch and I lifted Kate just barely off the ground and pulled her onto the gurney within an instant. “Good job. Sir, you’re going to have to drive us to the hospital while she helps me in the back of the bus.”

My eyes went wide. “Hotch, can you do that?” I wasn’t sure if he was physically or mentally able to do so. Why couldn’t I drive, and he could help?

“There’s no time to argue about it,” he responded.

“We’re going to have to be careful walking her to the bus,” the medic continued, ignoring our brief back and forth. “Try to walk steady so that I can keep the clamp on her artery.” We nodded again. “On my mark again. One, two, three.”

Hotch and I each lifted an end of the gurney. I could see his biceps flexing weakly and his face contorted into a tight, sour look in response to the pain running through him. But there was no time to stop and worry about that. We were given the go ahead to start walking. Hotch tried his best to not limp forward and I slowly walked backwards. The EMT was focused on holding the clamp on Kate’s back.

Getting her into the ambulance was the hardest part. I had to carefully step up backwards, then wait for the medic to step up, too, then I had to carefully waddle backwards while trying to not bump into anything or hit my head on the ceiling. When we were in, though, we carefully set Kate down on the floor. When he was sure that she was okay, Hotch immediately closed the door to the back of the ambulance, then ran to the driver’s seat.

“Come here,” the medic told me. I scooted on the bench we were sitting on so that I was pressed against his side. “See how I’m holding this? The angle, the pressure, everything?” I nodded. “You’re going to hold it like this while I get everything else for her.”

I froze.

I didn’t know if I could do that. It seemed like such an easy task, yet one wrong move could potentially kill Kate. How was I supposed to do that? Why couldn’t he keep holding it and I could grab everything else?

“Ma’am,” he caught my attention, “we need to do this now.”

Without thinking, I reached out for the clamp and switched places with him. I felt the clamp barely give out before I got my hands on it correctly and could apply the same pressure he had been holding for a few minutes already. The ambulance started to move and Hotch asked where the closest emergency room was located. As the medic started explaining to Hotch how we were supposed to get there, he reached for the oxygen mask and put it over Kate’s face. After Hotch made a careful left turn onto another road, the medic hooked Kate up to a heartbeat monitor. We took a right turn. Then a left. Another left. A right.

And then Kate’s eyes started fluttering open.

I gasped with relief.

“A—Aar—Aaron?” she croaked weakly.

“Kate?” he asked hopefully from the front seat. “Kate, we made it!”

I could see the corner of her lip turning up into a smile. “Thank you,” she said to the EMT.

He smiled, though she couldn’t see him. “Don’t thank me. Your partners did it all.”

Kate started to close her eyes again as she passed out. We made another left. Right. Right. Left. And there was the hospital, just ahead. While I expected Hotch to speed up to the front door, he actually started coming to a stop just outside of the parking lot. I cocked a brow and tried to look up front to see what was going on.

“What’s this?” Hotch asked out the window.

“Secret Service,” I heard a man answer from outside. What the hell? What was the Secret Service doing there? “We’re directing all emergencies over to Lenox Hill.”

“I’m SSA Hotchner. I have SSA Joyner and Agent Greenaway on board with me. Joyner, she was injured in the bombing at the field office. She needs to see the doctors here or she’ll die.”

“Credentials.”

Hotch hesitated. “They’re in my jacket back at the scene…”

“I appreciate that, Agent, but this hospital is on a strict bypass.”

“Aaron!” I called out. I looked at the EMT, “My credentials, they’re in the inside pocket of my jacket.” I lifted my elbow slightly to make my jacket move so that he could understand what I was talking about. He knew what he needed to do. He carefully reached around my arm and dug into my suit jacket, trying to avoid making it any weirder than it already was. “Give it to him.” The EMT had to practically throw my badge into the front seat since he couldn’t move around me to hand it to Hotch.

“Here, look—” Hotch pleaded desperately. “Agent Greenaway’s credentials. Please. Please, you have to let us through.”

There was silence for a moment, probably because the Secret Service agent was checking to see if my badge was legit. And then the relief came when he said, “Alright,” and then called out, “Open it up!”

We started moving again. When we reached the entrance to the emergency room, Hotch jumped out of the front seat and limped around to open the doors for us. He carefully climbed back in and grabbed the bottom end of the gurney and the medic grabbed the top. This was the worst part. I would have to walk with them while holding Kate’s back together— which practically meant that I was holding her life in my hands… Great. All I could do was suck in a deep breath, put on a brave face, and pray that I wouldn’t fuck it up.

We started carefully moving her out of the ambulance, the IV, heartbeat monitor, and oxygen mask all coming with us. The nice part this time around, though, was that the EMT put the wheels down so that we could roll her now instead of carrying her while Hotch was limping.

The second we burst through the front doors of the emergency room, we were swarmed by a group of doctors and nurses trying to talk to us and the medic about what was going on. One of the doctors came straight up to me to see what I was doing with the clamp, and while everyone else was trying to talk to me, too, he explained that we were going to trade places on the count of three while still walking with the group. I waited for his count, and the second we hit ‘three’, the doctor grabbed the clamp and I stumbled back out of the way.

Hotch caught me before I could knock him over. When I caught my balance, I stood up straight and let him limp to my side. He handed my credentials back to me and I shoved it back in my pocket. As the team of doctors started running with the medic and Kate down the hallway, Hotch and I watched breathlessly. I could see how lifeless she looked on that bed, and how they were all doing everything they could to save her. I wondered if she would be alright. I wondered if Hotch would be alright. And then I looked at him to get a read on how he was feeling. My heart did another somersault in my chest when I saw how pale and sick he looked. His eyes were searching for something to focus on, and his breath was sputtering like he couldn’t remember how to breathe.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” He didn’t say anything. He looked in my direction for a moment— but he wasn’t looking  _ at _ me. It was like he was looking  _ through _ me. And then he looked back down at the floor while trying to catch his breath. “Aaron?” I asked worriedly, trying to force my familiar face into his field of view. “Aaron, what’s going on? Talk to me.” I was trying to keep my cool, but he was really worrying me.

He pressed his palms against his ears and screwed his eyes shut. “It won’t stop ringing!” he shouted, unaware of how loud he was.

“Baby, look at me,” I pleaded, trying to hold back the sob in my chest. “Look at me.” I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands away from his head.

“I— I can’t… I can’t hear anything… I— Help… Help me…”

My grip on him started to slip as he collapsed onto the ground. He tried to catch himself on a nearby cart, but it rolled out under his weight, and he fell onto his side. I screamed and called for help, ducking down to hold him. His eyes were blinking slowly and dramatically as he tried to cling onto consciousness. His hand grabbed my shoulder for balance, but he couldn’t hold on. His eyes fell shut as he passed out on the ground.

I called for help again, trying to shake him awake.

A nurse ran over and crouched down beside me to start looking at Hotch’s wounds. I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe as I watched him lay unconscious on the ground. He looked dead… Blood oozed from his ears, eyes, mouth. His cuts were still bleeding to the point that his white shirt was now stained red. I grabbed my chest and fell backwards onto my tailbone. I struggled to find oxygen when I realized that I couldn’t remember how to breathe.

Why did he have to look dead? Why did this happen to us? Why him?

I tried screaming for help again, but nothing came out. I couldn’t make a sound and I couldn’t inhale. I clawed at the nurse’s arm and she turned to me to find me pointing to my chest. She called to the other doctors and nurses, catching me as I fell onto my back, too.

“Help me,” I croaked to one of the doctors as he leaned over me. “Please…”

“Try not to talk,” he cooed. “You’re having a panic attack. Just focus on my voice, alright?” I looked to the side to find them lifting Hotch onto a stretcher. I extended my arm out for him, but the doctor caught it and held my hand. “He’s going to be fine. I need you to look at me and try to breathe for me.” I looked back at the doctor and tried to inhale again, but nothing came. “Oxygen tank!” he called out to one of the nurses. She hurried over with an oxygen tank and a mask. They worked together to put the mask over my mouth and nose, then she turned on the artificial oxygen. I gasped as I took in a deep breath. “There you go,” the doctor smiled, brushing my hair out of my face to help calm me. “Deep breaths…”

“Aaron...” I cried behind the mask.

“He’s going to be just fine. Both of you are. Just keep breathing.”

“He didn’t know where he was—”

“It was just the shock. His mind did what it had to do in order to distract him from the pain so that he could get your friend here. He’s very brave.”

“Where did you take him—”

“Shhh…” he kept trying to coo me into tranquility, but I needed to know where they took Hotch. “Breathe with me, okay?” I nodded. “Deep breath in…” I inhaled with him slowly. We held our breaths for a moment. “And out…” We exhaled together. “Good,” he smiled. “Again. In… And out… There ya go. In… Out… In… Out… What’s your name?” I blindly reached for my ID and held it up for him. “It’s nice to meet you, Y/N. Keep going, in and out. What’s his name?”

“Aaron Hotchner.”

“Is he your husband?” He snapped in the nurse’s direction, a silent command for something he needed. Nodding was the easiest way to answer his question, though. I didn’t have the energy to correct him. “Alright, how does your chest feel now?” I nodded again and lifted a thumbs up. He chuckled. “Good. Can you tell me what happened?”

“We— I— They—” I started crying again as I tried to recall what happened. It didn’t feel like I couldn’t remember, like Hotch was struggling to do; it was that upon attempting to explain it all, my chest started to hurt again. “There was a bomb in his car… Morgan and I drove there as fast as we could.”

“Who’s Morgan?”

“My partner. We were working part of the case together when we got the call.”

“Where is he?”

I shook my head and started crying again. “I… I don’t know… He went to chase after the bomber…” Morgan could have been dead for all I knew. He chased after the Unsub alone, knowing all too well that he could get shot or there could be another explosion. “ _ Morgan! _ ” I shouted, trying to sit up.

The doctor put his hands on my shoulders and carefully held me down onto the floor. “Y/N, I need you to keep focusing on your breathing, alright? I still need to know what happened so that I can help your husband.”

I tilted my head in every direction in search of anyone I knew. Kate, Hotch, Morgan— even Rossi would have sufficed at that point. But there was no one but me and the group of medics who had collected around me and the doctor to try and help. The nurse that he had snapped at a few minutes ago came running towards us with an IV bag in hand.

The doctor cupped my face gently to make me look at him. “We’re going to give you something to help you calm down, but I need you to talk to me first.”

As the nurse grabbed my arm and started cleaning a patch of my skin for the needle, I tried to piece together my thoughts. “Morgan and I got the call that there was an explosion at the FBI field office. We were going to meet with Homeland Security when we found out… He was sitting in the middle of the road… Crying out for help…” The doctor wiped away my tears before they could get trapped under the oxygen mask. “But no one… No one would help him…”

“What was he doing in the road?”

“He was trying to help Kate… The explosion had thrown them both back, and the pavement tore up her back, I think. She couldn’t move and she was bleeding everywhere.”

“When you went over to your husband, did he say anything to you?”

I shook my head and winced as the nurse found a vein in my arm and slowly slid the needle in. “He… It was like he couldn’t even hear me. He complained about his ears before he collapsed… He begged me to help him… But I couldn’t—”

“Shh…” he tried to soothe me again as I got worked up. “The medicine will kick in soon and you’ll start to feel better. Did your husband say anything else to you? Was he acting odd in any other way?”

“He was limping. He was  _ bleeding _ everywhere, but he didn’t even realize it. He didn’t even know where he was or what had happened…”

Whatever they had given me— likely morphine, if I were to make an educated guess— started working fast, just like the doctor had promised. My breathing slowed from the desperate gasps and cries that it had been, and I didn’t feel any more pain in my chest. My whole body slowly began to go numb, including my amygdala— the part of the brain that controls emotional processing. I was still worried about Hotch and Morgan, but now I just couldn’t cry or scream about it. I just laid on the floor blankly. My mind was racing a mile a minute, but my body was so still I could have convinced anyone I was dead if it weren’t for the fact that I was still blinking.

“Y/N!” I heard Morgan’s voice call. At first, I thought that I was imagining it. Maybe the morphine, or whatever the hell it was, was working a little too well, and I was starting to picture things. I wanted Morgan’s comfort, to know that he was alright, and my brain was tricking me. “Y/N!” I tried to ignore it this time. I couldn’t focus on delusions when we needed to be focused on the case. “What happened to them?”

“Panic attack,” the doctor responded.

My eyes shot wide. The doctor saw him, too. I lifted my head again, even though it took a lot of fucking energy to do so.

Morgan slid to his knees beside me and cupped my cheek. “Hey, honey bunches, what’s going on?” he tried asking me calmly, but I saw past it.

Something had happened with the Unsub. Something bad. He had probably come to tell me the bad news and to make sure that Kate was alright, but the scene he found in the hospital was worse than he was expecting, and he couldn’t tell me anything worrisome.

“You feeling alright?”

I grabbed his hand from my cheek and held it tight. “Find Hotch…” I begged.

He shook his head, “No. I’m staying right here with you, sunshine. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” He turned to the doctor and whispered, “Give us a minute?”

The doctor nodded and patted Morgan’s shoulder. “I’ll go check on  _ him _ .”

When the doctor was gone, Morgan turned his attention back to me. “What happened?”

“An EMT came to help Kate. He brought us here. Hotch seemed fine— He even fucking drove us— And then he just kept screaming for help before he passed out. He looked dead, Morgan.” I squeezed his hand. “He looked dead… And I couldn’t breathe.”

Morgan silently checked the IV bag to see what they were giving me. Then, he turned to one of the nurses and asked if they could get me off of the filthy floor. They worked to get me onto another freaking gurney, but they didn’t lift it on its wheels yet.

“Please find him… I need to know what’s wrong with him…”

“Will you promise to stop worrying about everyone else then?” he asked me with a playful smile. I nodded, even though we both knew it was a white lie. “Okay,” Derek gave in. “Okay.”

He pushed himself to his feet after asking the nurse where he could find Hotch. She directed him to the correct room, and I watched him as he walked away. I couldn’t even crane my neck anymore to take a look at where he was going. All I knew was that he walked down a hallway in the direction my feet were pointing. I stared up at the ceiling, feeling the tears drip down my cheeks and temple, heading towards my ears and hair. I couldn't even move my hands far enough to wipe the tears away. I was just… immobile. I was a blob nothing. There was nothing to do but stare, blink, breathe, and wait.

“Where’s Y/N?!” I could hear Hotch scream in a panic at the end of the hall.

I felt like my heart should’ve sped up or done another somersault in my stomach, yet nothing happened. Like I said, a blob.

“Where are they?!”

“They’re fine!” Morgan insisted, raising his voice to match Hotch’s. “They had a panic attack, and the doctors gave them some morphine to help them, but they’re going to be okay. You need to get back into bed.”

“Move, Derek,” Hotch demanded. Somehow, I managed to find enough strength to lift my head enough to look down the hallway I heard the yelling come from. I saw Hotch come running out of one of the rooms. My strength wore out suddenly. My head fell back against the gurney. Honestly, I was surprised that Hotch was already up. “Y/N—” he called out to me, already running— well,  _ limping _ — his way over to me. “Baby—” He fell onto his knees, unable to make it a smooth landing. He was already wearing a hospital gown, and it looked like they had tried to hook him up to some IVs and machines before he woke up. “Are you okay?” he croaked as he put his hands on my cheeks. I wished that I could’ve kissed him, but there was nothing we could do with the oxygen mask over my mouth. “I’m so sorry…”

“I don’t care about me— Are you okay?” I tried to lift my hand up to his face, but my arm gave out halfway up. He nodded. “I was so worried… You weren’t picking up your phone.”

His eyes softened. “I lost it in the explosion. I had no idea.”

“I thought I lost you,” I cried behind the mask.

He leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine, ignoring that the oxygen mask was up against his nose now. “I’m here. I’m okay.”

“Hotch,” Morgan came over and put a hand on his shoulder, “they want to pull the shrapnel out of your leg. It’ll take about an hour or so.”

“No,” Hotch shook his head, holding onto me harder. “I’m staying here with you,” he whispered to me.

I shook my head. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

“No.”

I tried to push him off with what little energy I had. “Go.”

Hotch sat up to look at Morgan. “Has anything happened since the first blast?”

Morgan looked between both of us. We knew that Hotch needed to go into surgery, but he was being so damn stubborn, as usual. It was frustrating. I knew that I looked like a mess, but I didn’t care about that as long as Hotch was hurt. I needed him to get better. I’d feel better once I knew that he was okay.

“Nothing,” Morgan finally answered.

“Sam?”

“He’s dead.”

“You’re sure?”

“I saw it with my own eyes, Hotch.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, pulling the oxygen mask off my face.

Both Hotch and Morgan started to protest when I tried to sit up, but I ignored them for the sake of letting myself think for a moment. My head was spinning, but I needed to focus on the profile. We kept fucking it up. We were always a few steps behind these guys. Every time we thought we had the profile down, we were wrong.

“Get this fucking thing…” I huffed to myself, pulling the I.V. out of my arm. “Jesus,” I threw it to the side. I held my head in my hands to try to stop my eyesight from spinning. “We have it all wrong,” I croaked, though it was loud enough for them to hear. “The… the first responders…” I shook my head.

We thought that they were the real targets— just like any regular terrorist attack. But Sam, the kid who we thought was there to help Hotch and Kate, but was the real bomber… he had all that time to set the other bomb off or contact his partners to tell them that their plan was fooled. Yet he didn’t do anything. Why? If the first responders weren’t the real targets, then who was? Hotch and Kate… Their car was specifically targeted.

“Call the team here,” Hotch ordered Morgan. “I’ll do whatever the doctors want  _ after _ we finish this.”

* * *

When the team arrived, they brought a go-bag for Hotch so that he could change clothes, and three vests for me, Hotch, and Morgan. Rossi reached down to help me to my feet after I asked for it. Morgan was still trying to protest mine and Hotch’s further involvement, but there was a reason the two of us were perfect for each other and it was because we were so fucking stubborn it made everyone else mad. I wasn’t going to give this up. Someone out there tried to take Hotch away from me. They put a bomb in his car. I could have lost him because some psychopaths out there thought that they were somehow doing the world a favor by doing all of this. I was going to kill them. Hotch wasn’t allowed to die. He had too much to live for… And to think that they nearly stole him away from me, Jack, and Haley… it made my blood boil

“Are you guys okay?” Emily asked us.

I nodded while still pulling myself along on the front desk to my left. Hotch was limping a few steps ahead of me while putting on his vest. I didn’t understand how the hell he was the one who went through a bombing and had shrapnel in his leg, yet he could still be walking around; meanwhile, I was barely up on my feet because the doctor’s gave me some drugs because I had a mild freak out. Life’s a bitch sometimes

“I just want to understand why I’m still alive,” Hotch said. I felt my heart break in response to his words.

“I think the idea was to maim, not to kill,” Reid told him.

“Did you guys identify Sam, the bomber?”

“Garcia’s been trying to identify him and the other Unsub, but there’s nothing. They’re ghosts.”

“How’s that possible?” I inquired, leaning against the desk.

“They’re a terrorist cell,” Rossi answered plainly. “They know how to hide.”

I finally got to ask the question I’d been dying to know the answer to. “But why? If they’re not going after first responders or civilians, then why do all of this? Who’s the real target?”

“Well…” Rossi thought, stroking his beard as Emily got a computer out and put it on the desk. “Garcia said that the bomb was placed  _ under _ Kate’s car after you two got out and were heading into the building. They clearly targeted Kate and Hotch.”

“Still. Why?”

Emily pressed the spacebar on the computer to start playing a video. We all gathered around to watch. Kate and Hotch’s SUV was pulling up to the curb. I could see Hotch in the driver’s seat as he put the car in park, then he and Kate got out. He waited for her on his side as she walked around the front of the vehicle, then together, they talked for a moment before slowly making their way towards the field office building. Sam, the bomber, quickly emerged from behind a light bole while Kate and Hotch were still standing close to the car. He rushed to put the bomb under Kate’s car. Within a few seconds, Sam took cover in the distance again, and when Hotch and Kate started walking away, that was when he pressed the detonator.

I looked away when I saw Hotch go flying as the force of the bomb pushed outward.

“Did you ever find Sam’s cell phone?” Hotch spoke up when the video started replaying. I turned away from the computer entirely so that I wasn’t forced to watch. Morgan nodded. “Did he call 9-1-1?”

“No,” Morgan answered flatly. “He dialed one number six times every few minutes.”

“Garcia tracked the number, but it went dead a few minutes after Sam died. Whoever had it disposed of it quickly,” Reid added.

“He didn’t call 9-1-1…” Hotch whispered to himself. “Y/N—” I looked up at him— “the EMT that helped us, what did he say? How did he know?”

I shook my head as I tried to think. “He… He said that…” My head was spinning again. “He said that he heard you crying out for help and he couldn’t listen to it anymore.”

“But he came from the South side of the street. The barricade was on the North.”

“Sam stayed with you to make sure that the ambulance got to you… He left once he knew that someone was coming to help us. That’s why there was no second explosion. There wasn’t one set there in the first place. He targeted an SUV with two FBI agents in it only after you guys got out because the plan, like Reid said, wasn’t to kill you.”

Reid’s jaw fell to the floor as a thought struck him. “In a city under lockdown, the only way you can get into closed off areas is with a badge. Right now, everyone’s being hypervigilant, so a false I.D. wouldn’t work, but a—”

“A real FBI badge, like mine, the one we showed to the Secret Service downstairs, would get them through.”

“Secret Service? Why the hell are they here?” Rossi asked.

“That’s who Sam was calling,” Morgan said, ignoring Rossi’s comment. “The paramedic on the ambulance.”

“The ambulance that  _ I  _ drove in here,” Hotch said.

“But I didn’t see any bomb in there.” I was trying to recall the time I spent in the back of the ambulance with the paramedic. There was nothing suspicious back there. I mean, I was also a bit preoccupied with holding Kate’s back together— That was why he had me do it. I wondered why he didn’t want me to look for everything else around the ambulance. Like, why would he have trusted me with Kate’s life in comparison to just grabbing the oxygen mask? “Oh, my…”

“This hospital’s their next target,” Hotch agreed when he looked at me.

“Let’s go.” I pushed myself off the desk so that I could put my vest on, but as soon as I wasn’t holding onto something steady, I felt myself wobble. The room spun around me as I stumbled.

Morgan caught me. “Woah, honey bunches, slow down.”

I shook my head and pushed off of him in order to stand upright. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. You’re going to have to stay here,” Hotch said. I shook my head again. “You’re virtually high. You can’t go anywhere like this.”

“I can do this,” I insisted, wavering as I gained my footing.

Hotch glared at me. “No.” He holstered his weapon safely before addressing the team with, “Let’s go.” When they turned away, Hotch stepped to me, lifted my chin with his thumb to make me look at him. “I love you,” he whispered, screwing his eyes shut, resting his forehead against mine. “It’ll be okay.”

“I can’t lose you.”

“I can’t lose you either.”

I leaned in to kiss him. “Come back to me.”

“I will.” He kissed me again, this time with more force and passion before tearing himself away from me entirely so that he could catch up to the team. Despite his limp, he moved with a slight jog.

I loved him. I couldn’t lose him. If there was any doubt before about my devotion and endless love for him, that was gone now. I would’ve gone with him if he would’ve let me. I would’ve died for him. I would’ve fought for him. I still would. I loved him and I wanted to marry him. I wanted to be his forever and for him to be mine forever. I wanted to share his name and know that I would always have him.

I loved him.

I couldn’t lose him.

Suddenly, the hospital’s alarms started going off. The entire staff was set into motion as they all raced around to start following protocol. Amidst the chaos, I managed to sneak through the crowd and escape down a hallway where I found a floor directory that would lead me to the security room. While limping and holding onto the wall for balance, I made my way there. I tripped slightly when my head spun randomly. I cursed under my breath, but I kept moving, ignoring that the morphine was wearing off and I was feeling  _ everything _ all at once.

“Garcia,” I heard Rossi over the comm, “can you remote access the cell phone grid we’re in right now and jam all of the frequencies?”

“Yeah, I can, but only for a short period of time,” she responded.

“Do it. That’ll buy us some time. There’s a bomb in the basement of this building.”

I fell against the door to the security room, catching myself on the door handle just in time. I groaned, pushing myself up, then slowly opened the door. A frantic and confused security guard was sitting there, trying to understand what was happening and why the alarms were going off. When he noticed me and the vest I was wearing, he froze.

“FBI,” I stated the obvious. “Move,” I pushed him out of his seat. “Get out of here.” Just as I sat down, I looked to all of the different security camera monitors, trying to find my team first. They were on the first floor, gathered around the security desk where the Secret Service team was. “Shit,” I muttered when I saw Morgan run off on his own.

I checked the other monitors, searching for any sign of the paramedic that brought us here. We should’ve known that something was wrong. Both Hotch and I were blinded by panic for Kate, and I was worried about him, which stopped us from seeing that something was clearly wrong with Sam and the paramedic. We should’ve known. But we were both so desperate for help, we were willing to accept anything. And now this was all our fault.

And then I saw him stalking the halls on one of the monitors. “Where does this lead to?” I asked the guard standing behind me, pointing to the screen I was referring to.

“The basement,” he answered nervously.

I grabbed ahold of my comm on my vest and pressed on it to turn it on. “I’ve got eyes on the medic! He’s heading to the basement!”

“Do not engage, Y/N—” Hotch hissed, almost like he had just groaned at the fact that I didn’t obey my orders to stay out of this. But I wasn’t going to engage. I was stuck in the security room, the Unsub was in the basement, and the team was on the second floor. They would get there faster than me. “We’re heading there now.”

“Hotch,” Morgan said over the comms, “I’m already here.” He didn’t sound panicked or even like it was a matter of fact. The way Morgan was talking, it was like he was defeated and scared. I didn’t understand. The Unsub wasn’t there yet; why was he— “There’s a bomb in here big enough to take down the entire building and parking lot.”

Suddenly, the team was on their toes, running for the stairs since it would be faster than the elevators.

“Morgan?” Garcia croaked.

“Yeah, baby?”

“You’re not really down there, are you?”

“Yeah… I am…” He was quiet for a moment. “Baby, take this down for me FDNY 108. I need you to track it for me.”

“Why?” she asked worriedly.

“Just do it.” Now he was sounding hypervigilant. But I didn’t have eyes on where he was. I wasn’t sure why but I couldn’t see down there. Either there weren’t any cameras or the monitors that were out and staticky belonged to the basement where Morgan was. “Garcia, how much longer can you keep jamming the cell signals?”

“Only a few minutes. Maybe four. Why? Derek, what’s wrong?”

“’Cause I’m going to have to get this ambulance out of here.”

“No!” I cried out into my comm.

I jumped out of my seat, pushed past the clueless security guard staring at me like a deer lost in headlights, and I hurried for the stairs. I kept limping, this time with purpose. The staircase was just around the corner. The second I was in the stairwell, I grabbed my gun off my hip and held it one hand while I grabbed onto the railing with the other. I was still a few floors up, and I was terrified that by the time I would get to the basement, Morgan would be gone, or worse… No. We were going to put an end to all of this chaos, and all of us would get out of it alive. I had no doubts. We were the best of the best. If Morgan did something stupid like getting himself blown up, I was going to kill him myself. I wasn’t going to lose any of them. I  _ couldn’t _ lose them.

I was only on the second floor. Shit. I needed to move faster, yet I couldn’t. The fucking morphine. I hated whichever doctor it was that decided to give it to me. What happened with me after Hotch passed out was just an overreaction. I was fine. I… It was nothing. I didn’t need these fucking drugs to slow me down.

“Garcia, switch us to another channel,” Morgan ordered.

“No—” I tried arguing, but they were already gone. “Fucking Derek Morgan,” I mumbled under my breath, hurrying even more, despite how much pain I was in. It was just an overreaction earlier. Nothing more. I was fine. I felt fine. The aching in my chest and bones was nothing. It was just the morphine wearing off. I was fine, alright. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.” I took in the deep breaths like the doctor taught me when he was trying to call me down earlier. “I’m fine…”

I finally reached the door to the basement. Everything was going to be alright.

I stumbled into the second stairwell, catching myself on the wall. My legs felt like jello, yet my feet felt like they were on fire. That didn’t matter, however, as long as Morgan was down there, and the team was somewhere hunting the Unsub. I just needed to find a familiar face or put an end to this by putting a bullet in the Unsub’s forehead.

When I made it to the basement, I found that the white tile hallway was entirely empty and dark. All of the doors on either side of the corridor had been opened up to their fullest extent, but for the closed ones, I passed by them and jiggled the handles to see if they would budge. It seemed like the team had come through here with the same thought: check every room possible to see if the asshole is hiding in here. But all of the rooms were cleared of locked. So I kept moving.

I approached an opening in the hallway, kind of around where I anticipated the elevator doors would be. So as I tiptoed up, holding my gun in hand, I waited around the corner for a moment to listen for movement. As I expected, I heard the elevator door dinging, which meant it was there, the only problem, however, was that it was dinging over and over again like it was trying to say: “HELLO! I’m here! Let me close the door!” So I peeked around the corner carefully, barely revealing an eye.

My heart sank in my chest when I saw that the elevator was indeed there, but there was a pile of dead bodies inside. Someone’s leg was sticking out. A guy’s leg. A leg covered with a dark suit like Hotch was wearing. The shoe was the same color and size. The leg was right in front of the door, preventing it from closing, which was why it was screaming to the world: “HELLO?!” over and over again.

“Hotch?” I croaked, carefully approaching. I could’ve sworn that I saw them all head towards the stairs, but maybe Hotch went with the Secret Service. I prayed that he wasn’t there. “He’s fine,” I whispered to myself before putting my hand on the elevator door to push it back. All of the Secret Service agents were dead… massacred before they could even grab their weapons. Someone had been waiting for them right where I was standing. There was no Hotch, though. “He’s not here… He’s fine…” I turned with my gun raised to continue moving on.

There were bloody footprints on the ground, only one set. I examined them quickly before taking note that they weren’t Hotch’s shoe size. Good. He hadn’t been around this. He was okay. He wasn’t involved in this mess. He was with the team. He was safe. Everything was going to be alright. So I made my way down the hallway, following the footprints cautiously.

When the tracks came to an end as the blood dried out and wore out on the Unsub’s boot, I realized that he had made it to where the ambulance was supposed to be. Yet, as I turned the corner with my weapon raised, finger on the trigger, prepared to shoot whoever was there that I didn’t recognize, I saw that the ambulance was gone. It was long gone. Morgan was gone. And the team was standing there, grouped together in a half circle around the Unsub, who was sitting on the ground, smirking.

And then he slit his own throat open with a knife he had in his hand.

No warning, no last words, no attempt to make a deal and get out of there alive. He knew that this was a suicide mission, and he wasn’t willing to live in a world where he lost. And there was nothing we could do to stop him. Like the kid who died earlier after Emily shot him, this man was our final hope of getting answers, but now he was gone, and we had nothing. There could have been a larger cell out there, and we would never know. This whole thing was over, and I was relieved, but there were a thousand unanswered questions. And the worst part was that we could possibly never know the truth. I wasn’t sure how to live with that.

Hotch looked up to see me leaning against the corner. I was trying to stand up straight, but I just couldn’t. My body was starting to give out again, and all of the panic that had been left over from earlier that I ignored so that I could finish this, was hitting me like a train. I looked at Hotch and I saw him collapsing on the ground over and over again. I heard him screaming, crying, begging for help. I felt him holding onto me as he tried to cling onto consciousness. I felt it all a thousand times harder than before, yet this time around, I didn’t fall over. I felt it, but it stayed bottled up in the pit of my stomach. I could breathe, but barely. I could see, but hardly. The only comfort I had was seeing Hotch there, in front of me, alive.

“Kate,” he muttered, limping his way over to me. I held his arm out for me, and I knew that he needed someone to hold onto because his body and mind were also finally giving out, too. He should’ve gone into surgery earlier, but he pushed it off, and now he was paying the price. “We need to check on Kate,” he told me as we both started hobbling back towards where we came from. Since the elevator was clogged, we had to take the stairs, which was a pain. “Are you okay?” he asked. We took the first few steps up, both of us groaning in pain. I nodded. “You’re sure?” His weight on my shoulders was killing me, but I was fine.

“I’m fine as long as you’re fine,” I answered. “You promise you’ll go into surgery once we check on Kate?”

He nodded. “As soon as they’ll take me.” He started fidgeting with the velcro straps on his vest. “Help me get this off,” he begged quietly. As we kept walking up the steps slowly and carefully, I reached over to him and started pulling at the straps. When they were all unstuck, he used his free hand to lift the vest over his head. “Thanks.” I nodded shortly. “You want yours off?” I knew that his arm draped over my shoulders was the only thing keeping him upright, so I shook my head, denying his offer. “You shouldn’t have gone downstairs.”

“I couldn’t let you go alone. I couldn’t just sit around, knowing that you were in danger while all beat up.”

“And I told you to stay back…”

“It’s not worth arguing about.”

“I’m not arguing, Y/N. I just want to protect you because I love you.”

We reached the floor of the O.R. and I opened the door. Neither of us said anything else as we stepped into the hallway and started walking towards the theater where they were performing surgery on Kate. Since they pulled the alarm to clear the hospital, the only people left were the surgeons and nurses left to help in the O.R. while Kate and the mystery politician were getting help. No one was there to stop us from walking past the doors that were meant to keep everyone but doctors and family members out.

Just ahead, on our left, we saw the operating room Kate was taken to. Hotch had a little more pep in his step as we got closer. He was ready to see her. He just wanted to know that she was alright, and that everything would be just fine eventually. It would take a long time, but things would go back to normal at some point. Kate would be awarded a thousand different titles by the Bureau for shutting down a terrorist cell, Hotch would heal and also be rewarded by the Bureau and myself somehow, and the panic coursing through my entire body would subside. All of this would be a distant memory one day. I had to hold onto that hope. This nightmare wasn’t going to last forever, and we were all going to be family again in our bullpen back at Quantico.

Hotch let go of me so that he could hurry in to talk to the surgeon about how it went. But when I turned in just after him, I came to a sudden halt. Hotch still seemed confused, like back at the field office after the bombing, but I understood. It was plain and simple. There was blood all over the floor, two nurses mopping everything up as best they could. On the operating table, there was a body covered by a blue plastic sheet, also covered in blood. And I felt my heart sink. Hotch  _ still _ didn’t seem to understand, because he turned to the surgeon and asked him what happened and where Kate was.

I stepped forward and put a hand on his bicep. “Baby…”

“No,” he huffed, shrugging off my touch. “Where is she?!” he yelled at the surgeon. “Where’s Kate?!”

The surgeon put his hands on his hips. “We did everything we could.”

“Aaron, it’s okay,” I cooed, reaching out for his arm again. He dodged me by stumbling towards the table. With a shaky hand, he grabbed the sheet covering her and lifted it slightly to take a look. I immediately saw his face tighten like he had eaten something sour because he was trying to hold back a sob. “Aaron…” I hurried to him and hugged his body to make sure he wouldn’t fall over again.

“The nurses told me that you’ll be going into surgery next,” the surgeon said to Hotch after giving him a minute to register what was happening. “I’ll sort out rooms for the two of you so that the doctors and nurses can make sure you’re alright.”

“Just one room,” I begged him. “I’m fine.” I didn’t want to leave Hotch’s side, especially now.

The surgeon eyed us both before nodding and leaving. When it was just the two of us and the silent nurses cleaning up the mess on the floor, Hotch finally broke down. He faced me and hugged my waist so that I could hug his neck. He squeezed me so tight I felt my heels leave the ground. As I squeezed him back, I felt my toes leave the ground. I was in his arms entirely, hanging limp in our tight embrace. We hid our faces in each other’s necks, me taking in his scent while he sobbed. I didn’t know what to do or think. Kate and I didn’t exactly get along… but her and Hotch… they were old friends. And something everyone had been discussing over the past couple of days was that there was clearly something there between them, no matter how small the spark. Losing her for him was probably like if I ever lost Morgan…

Morgan.

I wanted to check on Morgan, but I knew that I couldn’t let go of Hotch. I didn’t know what to do. He could have died for all I knew, and I hadn’t thought to try calling him yet, and now, when I wanted to, I couldn’t. I had to be there for Hotch. I had to hold and console him to the best of my ability because he lost someone who meant a great deal to him. The only person in the world who could ease that pain in his heart was me. So I held on for dear life. I squeezed him harder, refusing to let go or release my hold on him for even a second. If Jack were with us, he would’ve called this a Superman hug because of how we were practically compressing the life out of each other.

Kate looked a lot like Haley, no one was ever going to deny that. Hell, that was the first thought that struck most of the team when we first met her. It was one thing to lose a friend, it was another to lose a friend that looked exactly like his ex-wife. Hotch and Kate clearly had some feelings for each other, and Hotch and Haley still had some feelings for each other, but none of that amounted to us. I wasn’t thinking that to prove something to myself or to be a bitch, but because it was true. He said it to me a million times. Despite that, however, it was probably hard for him to look at Kate and not see Haley, too. He couldn’t lose Haley the same way he couldn’t lose me. This was a taste of what losing Haley could possibly feel like. And the way he was sobbing for Kate that was breaking my heart. I never wanted him to lose Haley because I wasn’t sure if he survived it; and if he broke down any harder than  _ this _ , I wouldn’t survive either.

“Looks like you’re both back on your feet,” someone said from the door. Hotch and I parted to see the doctor who was helping me calm down earlier standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Hotch’s breath sputtered. “But we, um… we do need to prep you for surgery now.”

I looked up at Hotch before running my fingers through his long, soft, dark black hair. It felt unfair that he had to deal with all of this at once. From the bombing to getting right back up on his feet in order to take down the Unsub to finding Kate like that… Now he had to go into surgery with all of that racing in his mind. And it was going to take them a few hours to perform the surgery… A few hours without being by his side, without being to console him, without being able to hold him… I felt like I was going to die.

“Okay,” Hotch answered, sniffling.

I shook my head. “Baby—”

“You made me promise, remember?”

He was right. I wanted him to get help as soon as possible, and that included going into surgery. They told us earlier that they needed to pull shrapnel from his leg. He had been walking on that all evening, and he had refused help the entire time, but then I finally made him promise that he would do it the first chance he got; but now I didn’t want him to leave.

“I’ll be fine,” he whispered, kissing me lightly. I could feel how wet his cheeks were from crying and it made my heart shatter in my chest. “I love you.” Again, before he could convince himself to stay, he went with the doctor to prepare for his surgery.

When the room was silent again, I turned to the table. The nurses were still mopping up the blood, unbothered by my presence, and I did as Hotch earlier, lifting the sheet slightly to make sure that it was her. My lip quivered when I saw her lying there. She was pale, her lips blue, her blonde hair still covered in dried blood, her eyes shut peacefully. I could inspect a million different bodies for cases and never bat an eye, yet seeing Kate like that— a friend of Hotch’s, who therefore should have been a friend of mine— it was unsettling. She didn’t deserve this. She tries so hard to make her life and career mean something, and yet it all boiled down to a group of small, wicked men who never amounted to anything. Kate meant something. Her life and career were successes. The men who did this to her died, and so did their ultimate plan. They lost. Kate could rest easy knowing that her death meant something, that she wouldn’t be forgotten or unappreciated.

My phone started ringing, which prompted me to carefully lay the sheet back over her face, then take a step out of the operating room. I grabbed my phone from my pocket. When I saw who was calling, I immediately answered it with, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you—”

“Woah, mama. What did I ever do to deserve that?” Morgan asked on the other end, chuckling to himself lightly.

I let my eyes fall shut. Relief washed over me when I heard how relaxed he sounded compared to earlier. He was alright. He wasn’t dead. I still had him. “I hate you so much, Derek Morgan. I swear, when I see you again—”

“Hey!”

I sucked in a shaky breath. “I need you here.”

“I’m on my way.” He sighed. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, though he couldn’t see me. So I lied, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Greenaway, we talked about this. I know when something’s wrong.”

“I hate you,” I said again, smiling to myself. My face fell flat again. “Kate didn’t make it.” There was static on the call as he took in what I said. “And they’re taking Hotch into surgery.” I kicked the tile floor. “The paramedic killed himself when the team cornered him.”

“Rossi told me.”

I walked to the waiting room and took a seat. “I want to marry him, Morgan. More than ever.” I brought my thumb to my mouth and started nervously biting on my nail. “I’ve never been more sure of anything, but I really,  _ really _ want your support on it.”

“I get it,” he said suddenly. “I get it, Y/N.”

My shoulders relaxed. “Really?”

“The way you two put each other first before yourselves… I get it. I’ll support you, sunshine. I promise.”

“I don’t hate you so much anymore.”

He chuckled. “I almost died tonight, so I sure hope not.”

“Well, I still hate you for that,” I laughed. “But… I love you, Derek. I mean it.”

“I love you, too, Greenaway.”


	27. ANGEL MAKER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Talk of murder, rape. sexual assault, forced impregnation, Hybristophilia, loss of child-- literally everything Criminal Minds. Mentions of panic attack(s), anxiety, PTSD, shock, etc. (I think that covers it all. Please, if I missed anything triggering, TELL ME!)
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 4 Episode 02. A week after part twenty-six.

There were a thousand times throughout the past week when Hotch wasn’t by my side and I felt anxious. He wanted to get back to work as quickly as the doctors cleared him, and since his leg healed pretty fast— or he was at least pretending like it had healed fast—he was back in time for the next case JJ had for us. I was still worried, however. It killed me to go to work every day while he was on bed rest. Getting to come home to him every day, though, to see that he was alive and alright, that was a relief of sorts. Leaving with him on Monday morning after picking him up from the doctor’s office was… less relieving. I mean, they cleared him, of course. He had been going to make sure that his ears were going to be okay, too, since I was worried about that, but he insisted that the doctor said everything was fine. Everything wasn’t fine, though. I could tell. I knew him well enough to know when he was lying or when he was pretending for my sake. He didn’t want me going to his checkups, and at first I understood, but then I slowly started getting suspicious when he was coming home from them without immediately coming to tell me any news— even though it was “all good news”, according to him.

I told Morgan early on that I was worried about Hotch. After New York, Morgan was trying to find ways to be more open and understanding with me. I think he realized that he had been a prick in the car that night when he said he agreed with JJ. I think he realized that he was wrong, and that his choice as my best friend was to either support me entirely or to forget me. And we didn’t want to forget each other. We had been worried sick that night, and his near death experiences in the ambulance seemed to have knocked some sense into him. So when I told him, he insisted that Hotch himself was probably okay, but he was just worried about me in the same way I was worried about him. I wanted to believe Morgan; I really did… But I told Morgan the same thing I had been telling Hotch and all of the doctors: what happened to me that night wasn’t a common occurrence. I didn’t get panic attacks. I didn’t freak out like that. It was a one time thing, and everyone just needed to get over it. If Hotch were really concerned, he should’ve just told me the truth, and then I wouldn’t’ve been concerned about him, and vice versa. Cause and effect kind of thing.

“Are you over Hotch passing out?” Morgan asked as we sat in the boardroom together to get some privacy. I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because he scared the shit out of me.”

“Hotch feels the same way about your panic attack. I saw him. He pulled all of those I.V.s out of his arms and pushed a nurse to the side just to get back to you. If you expect that he has to be honest with you, then shouldn’t you show him the same courtesy?”

Well… I hadn’t thought of it like that. I really didn’t think that what happened to me was a big deal—but that could have just been denial—and I hadn’t stopped to think that maybe Hotch was worried sick about me. I didn’t want him to hide things from me because of me, though. That wasn’t the point. We made a promise to each other that we wouldn’t keep secrets from each other. Him being honest about his health should’ve been the most important thing to us.

Then JJ interrupted to tell us that we had a case. Morgan thanked her while I kept my gaze lowered. We hadn’t talked since New York, and I felt like I had reason to continue staying distant from her for a while. I couldn’t bear that Morgan disapproved of me and Hotch because it sounded like he was more concerned for me than just trying to say: “Are you sure?” a thousand times. Once he knew that I was really sure about marrying Hotch, Morgan gave in because he only wanted what was best for me. JJ, on the other hand… Well, she hadn’t even tried to apologize. According to her behavior, she seemed adamant on maintaining her position. She didn’t think that Hotch and I were a good fit. And that broke my heart into a million pieces, because,  _ of course _ I wanted her to support us, but I wasn’t going to tolerate that she was disapproving just for the sake of it. Her reasons didn’t hold. She wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a mother to Jack, or willing to spend time with Haley, or ready to actually be a wife. But what she failed to recognize was that I  _ was _ ready for all of that. I was ready, and I tried to tell her, yet she didn’t seem to believe me. I couldn’t forgive that.

“I’ll call Hotch,” she said quietly.

“He’s at the doctors,” I told her, though I was still looking at the ground.

“I know. I’ll tell him to meet us at the jet.” She stepped into the room and started laying out the case files for everyone.

The rest of the team started filing in moments later. I turned in my seat to face forward, ignoring everyone’s glares, and opened the case file. JJ started running through it, but I ignored her in order to just educate myself. I think it was obvious to her and everyone else what I was doing, though.

Delilah Grennan was found dead in her home two nights ago. She had been raped repeatedly, bludgeoned to death, then presented post-mortem with her palms laid over her chest innocently— which meant that the Unsub felt remorse for what he had done. What conflicted with the hands of purity and innocence, however, were the stab wounds inflicted post-mortem, also a part of the Unsub’s ritual. That part probably came before the hand placement. The oddest part was actually about the rape that occurred during the initial attack. The local PD tried to run the semen found in her through VICAP in order to get a DNA match—which would have made this an open and shut case—the only problem: it matched that of a known serial killer named Cortland Bryce Ryan, also known as the “Angel Maker”. The issue with that was that he had been in prison since his arrest, and the one year anniversary of his execution was two days ago. The day of the murder.

“Were there any other victims?” Emily asked.

“Kinda,” JJ answered, managing to catch my attention. “Victimology and signature match almost perfectly with an old serial killer who was executed a year ago.” I knew that from the file. “He raped and killed six women in ten months.” She pressed a button on the TV remote, which revealed crime scene photos from the original Angel Maker case ten years ago. “It’s all the exact same. The copycat even opened all of the windows in the house, which was what Cortland did; however, that information was never released to the public.”

“So, then, this is definitely someone who knew Cortland personally,” I said.

JJ eyed me cautiously for a second as if she were asking herself if it were safe to address my comment. But she nodded and continued with, “Yes. Probably.”

“There’s one discrepancy, though,” Reid said after awkward silence hung in the air for a moment. “Cortland used his bare hands to beat his victims, but the M.E. concludes that Delilah was beaten with a hammer or some other heavy instrument.”

“So, this guy is weaker,” Morgan concluded.

Emily raised a brow. “Why wouldn’t his victim fight back, then?”

Silence blanketed the room. We all looked over at Rossi, as the lead profiler in the room, to see if he had anything to add. He shrugged at all of us. It was then decided amongst us that we would discuss it more on the plane where Hotch would be waiting. So I collected my file quickly and went to my desk to grab my go-bag. That was when I felt Emily poke my shoulder. I jumped in my own skin before turning and realizing that it was just her.

“Sorry, Ms. Jumpy,” she laughed. “I just wanted to ask if everything is alright.”

“What?”

“With you and JJ.”

I looked up at the boardroom to see Morgan and JJ talking privately—probably about me. I sighed and zipped up my go-bag again. “Yeah, we’re fine.”

“I mean, you’re clearly  _ not _ .”

“You know I love you, Em, right?” I asked her quietly. She nodded. “Then I need you to really not take offense to this: please drop it. It’s none of your business.”

Emily fell silent and took a retreating step backwards. “Right. Of course. Sorry.”

“No—” I insisted, grabbing her hand. “I’m sorry. I just…” I sighed again. “It’s really complicated right now. I swear, once things are sorted out a bit more, you’ll be the first person I tell. I swear.” I squeezed her hand and glanced around the bullpen quickly. The only person around was Anderson, but he had headphones in as he was eating his breakfast. I looked at her again. “You’re the only one who never doubts me and Hotch. You know that?”

“Why would I doubt you two?” she chuckled. “Like you said, it’s not my business. But the opinion I’ve naturally made is that you’re really good for him, and he’s really good for you. Who am I to come in here and tell you any different?”

I shrugged and looked up at JJ again. “Yeah. I don’t know.”

* * *

When we arrived at the jet, I saw Hotch waiting just outside for us. I smiled lightly at him and walked straight towards him while the rest of the team filed onto the jet. When we were alone, I bounced up on my toes and kissed him. He cupped my cheek briefly as he leaned into our kiss. We both pulled away at the same time. I took his hand in mine while looking at the windows of the jet to make sure none of the team was watching. After my conversations with JJ and Morgan, it was probably no secret that Hotch and I were serious about our relationship, and since New York it was getting increasingly harder to hide the fact that I needed physical reassurance of Hotch’s presence and safety nearly all the time. I didn’t like being reliant and distracted like that, but… I almost lost him… I deserved a pass for a bit until I stopped worrying about him. Our rules about not making our relationship a big deal at work were slowly starting to mean nothing to me. I loved Hotch. I loved him more than anything, which was why I worried so much. Touching him, holding him, and kissing him was the only way I could calm down now. The team would understand that, right? Still, though, Hotch didn’t like it. I had to understand that, kind of. So, I let go of him reluctantly.

“What did the doctor say?”

Hotch shrugged. “I’m the poster child of perfect health.”

I furrowed my brows. I didn’t believe him. There was no way that a week after being in a bombing and going through surgery he was suddenly in perfect shape. I mean, he wasn’t really limping now, and he wasn’t fussing about his ears. Maybe it was actually possible. But still. The scrapes and bruises were still on him, and until those would disappear, I’d be wary. Even though I trusted Hotch, and he promised to never lie to me, I had to keep an eye on him. He said the doctor’s said he was fine… If I was suspicious about that, then that was my choice. But until I knew for sure that something was wrong, I was going to bite my tongue.

“Hey, lovebirds!” Morgan yelled at us as he stuck his head out of the jet. “Cincinnati awaits us!”

Hotch walked away from me before I got a chance to inquire further about what happened with the doctor. He was so reluctant to tell me anything about those visits. At first, I was understanding, but now that I could tell he was being weird about something, I was starting to get annoyed. Whatever was going on, I’d found out eventually. He had to know that. I always found out, and if it turned out that he was lying to me, I’d rain hell down on him—just like I did when he went behind my back to ask for a transfer five months ago. How time flew. Geez.

I sat next to Hotch at the big table. JJ and Reid were across from us—though I refused to look up at JJ even once; and Morgan and Rossi were sitting on the couch to my left. While the engines started whirring for takeoff, I felt Hotch’s ankle caress mine lovingly. He knew that even a year in, I still had trouble with the jet taking off. It didn’t help that Reid would always give those statistics about how takeoff and landing were the most dangerous points of a flight. Hotch knew that Reid’s statistics always ran through my mind when the engines started up. He knew that I hated this part. He knew that it made me tense up. He also knew that I was getting better at hiding it because I felt like the others wouldn’t understand my continuous anxiety about something like this. Since Hotch and I weren’t sitting in the back on our own, he couldn’t grab my hand to comfort me. So he used his ankle. And I silently thanked him for it by nudging him back.

As the plane started racing down the runway, the team began discussing some theories about the case. Spencer was going on and on about an “evil and an eviler twin” while everyone stared at him blankly. I chuckled to myself. Spencer glared at me lightly and questioned what I thought about all of it. So I looked down at the case file to give it one more review before presenting my hypothesis.

I thought there was no way there were twins involved in all of this. I mean, the DNA would’ve matched, sure, but… come on, that was _out_ _there_. This copycat we were dealing with used a hammer to bludgeon his victims before performing the same ritual the Angel Maker did. This was all a very convincing ruse to make people think that the Angel Maker was back, but he had been dead for a year. Someone managed to somehow get a test tube sized amount of Cortland Ryan’s semen, and they were using it to “prove” the hypothesis, but we could see through it. Well, all of us except for Reid, apparently. The question about all of this really should have been “why” instead of “how”. Cortland raped and inseminated his victims, and the police thought that the ritual of stabbing his victims’ stomachs was a figurative way of killing the future child that could have been born from that act. However, in prison, Cortland denied this theory, but he refused to say what the truth was. So why? Why did Cortland do it, and why was this Unsub doing it?

Hotch groaned quietly next to me as the plane climbed towards altitude. I stopped talking halfway through my explanation to look at him. He was holding his head in his hands, his eyes shut, his entire body tense.

“Baby,” I whispered, taking his hand under the table.

“Yeah?” he whispered back. He was much quieter than I was, and he still wasn’t looking at me— or really even focused on me at all. It seemed like he only responded just to get me to lay off compared to actually listening to what I had to say.

I squeezed his hand. “The doctor  _ did _ clear you to fly, right?”

“Mhm.”

“So, then, what’s wrong?”

Hotch bit his lip and threw his head back against the seat. His eyes were screwed shut and his face was contorting into an unattractive look in response to whatever pain he was feeling. “It’s just a headache,” he insisted. “I’m fine.” He tore his hand away from me and looked at the team. They all seemed just as concerned as I was, but he ignored their worry by redirecting their attention back to the case.

Everyone kept watching Hotch closely as he gave out our assignments. Morgan and I were to head to the prison to take a look at Cortland’s personal effects and to talk with the guards there about who Cortland was close to, and who could have possibly helped him get his semen out of the prison. Reid was going to head to the crime scene with Hotch, Rossi and Emily were going to check out the body at the morgue, and JJ was going to start meeting with the local PD about the case.

Hotch hadn’t yet decided to bench JJ since finding out that she was pregnant, but he was adamant about keeping her out of harm’s way. So, she was left to work at the police stations and the hotels. That was it. Honestly, she seemed fine with it. I knew that if I were in her position, and Hotch were benching me like that, I would have been pissed. It had only been a week since we found out, she wasn’t even showing, and yet Hotch was already making sure that she was safe. I mean, I understood the thought process. I knew that he didn’t want her to get hurt, because he was responsible for making sure she was safe and healthy. But still. I would’ve hated the idea of being cooped up in a police station all day. At least she got that much, though. Once she would start to show, I had no doubts that Hotch would pull her out of the field—that was if she weren’t going to make that decision herself. JJ spent a lot of her time in the office and in the precincts, anyhow. She probably didn’t want to put herself in danger while pregnant, and that was understandable.

* * *

As Morgan and I pulled up to the prison, I took in every detail of it. Compared to all of the other prisons I had seen inside and out, this place was  _ much _ nicer. In fact, it had a Victorian era feel to it. The high, castle-like walls were a light tan color, and the material looked like limestone, if I were to make a guess. There weren’t even electric fences surrounding the outside of the prison because that was how high and rough the walls were. There was no way in hell anyone was climbing those—and even if they tried, a guard would probably shoot them off before they could get very far because on every corner and in the middle of each wall were guard towers. Those weren’t modern either. Honestly, if we weren’t in Cincinnati, I would’ve thought we were touristing at a castle in Europe.

The front gate was as expected. The check points were modern, but they were built into the old walls for support. If someone wanted to drive straight through, I wished them luck, because there was no way in hell that any of this was budging even the slightest bit.

Morgan parked the car in the tiny parking lot in the courtyard where prisoner transport buses were kept. We got out, both of us putting our sunglasses on, then headed inside. They required that we put our weapons away in locked cubbies before even entering the security area where they made us walk through two metal detectors, and they still had to pat us down, anyhow. It was exhausting. All of that just to see if there was something of interest in Cortland’s belongings before he died. Honestly, there could’ve been nothing. It was entirely possible that Cortland had nothing in his belongings that pointed to who could have possibly started killing again on his behalf. My hope, however, was that there would be something in the visitor’s logs. Maybe someone who visited often, or someone with a personal connection. Any lead was a good lead.

When we got through security, there was a man waiting for us just ahead. His legs were spread at shoulder width, his hands on his hip, his moustache tickling his lip to the point that he kept scrunching his face to try to stop it.

“Welcome to Hawksville,” the guard said, reaching out to shake Morgan’s hand before mine. “My name’s Sid.” He stood tall and pointed to his name tag. “Sid Rutledge.”

Morgan and I smiled at him politely. I introduced us, then got straight to the point. “We’d like to see Cortland Ryan’s personal belongings, if you don’t mind.”

Rutledge laughed at my bluntness. “Sure thing, little lady.”

When he turned his back, I looked at Morgan and rolled my eyes. We started following him through the corridors of the prison. We were still in the front section of the place, which was where all of the offices and break rooms were. The inmates were kept further into the prison, out of our way. He led us to a room filled with boxes and boxes of past and current inmates’ things. It seemed odd that these things would just be sitting around, collecting dust. It made me feel uneasy for some reason.

“Ryan didn’t have any next of kin,” Rutledge began, “so after the execution, all of his belongings were boxed and stored.” He set two file boxes on the table in front of me and Morgan.

I raised a brow. “This is all of it? All ten years, this is everything? I thought he was popular here.”

“He was; but a lot of the inmates get creative with getting letters in and out of the prison because the Warden keeps an eye on all official correspondence.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I whispered to Morgan.

“Not in prison, it isn’t, sweetheart,” Rutledge answered.

Morgan opened up one of the boxes and started sifting through all of the letters Cortland got while he was in prison. Most of them were letters from women around his age—crazy fans who were trying to earn his favor. I couldn’t begin to imagine why. I mean, seriously. Why the hell would anyone think: “Ooh, serial killer in prison! He’s hot!” Like… What? But to each their own, I supposed, right.

“Did Cortland have any male fans?” Morgan inquired.

“I suppose there were some, sure. They were all total freaks. This one kid—maybe eighteen or nineteen—would visit every six months or so. He was a musician or some shit like that because he always liked to brag about that damn song he wrote for Ryan.”

“Did you ever catch Ryan trying to smuggle things out of the prison? Maybe to this kid or something?”

Rutledge chuckled. “Usually, they’re trying to sneak stuff  _ in _ , not  _ out _ .”

“May I see Cortland’s visitor logs from the past ten years?” I asked. “We need to check every single person who ever came to visit him.”

He chuckled again. “Over the past ten years? That’ll be a lotta names. It’ll take ya forever.”

I smiled sourly. “I’ll figure something out.”

Rutledge shrugged before gesturing for me to follow him out of the room. We ventured down another few doors before taking a left into another room identical to the one Morgan was in. Rutledge ran his fingers over a few of the file cabinets, mumbling under his breath as he counted or something, and then he came to an abrupt halt. He chuckled in eureka before pulling one of the drawers open. I watched as he started collecting about two to three different files for me. When he had everything he thought I would need, he threw them on the table between us.

“There ya go.”

“Thank you,” I said, grabbing a seat at the table.

“If ya don’ mind, I’ll be headin’ back to the other room to make sure Mr. Shiny Head doesn’ steal anything.”

I held back a chuckle.  _ Mr. Shiny Head _ . Oh, I was going to be using that, and I wasn’t going to let it go, no matter how much shit Morgan would give me for it.

When Rutledge left, I dug into all of the logs. I started at the very beginning, just skimming for names that stuck out or repeated. I took my time, trying to remember any name that I had spotted in the case file, anyone who wasn’t from the state, anyone who didn’t have any kind of relation with Cortland or the Ryan family, and so on. There was ten years’ worth of visitor information in those files, and I had to go through all of it. My hope, however, was that I would spot something out of the ordinary fairly fast so that I didn’t have to waste all day doing this. Maybe Reid should’ve come to the prison to do this. He would’ve read all of these logs in, like, five minutes—if that. Asshole. He was a good friend and a good profiler, but still… Asshole. I wished that I could read half as fast as he could.

And then something caught my eye. Shara Carlino. I had hardly made it through the first year within the logs, and her name showed up every single day. Every. Single. Day. She waited every day before the prison would open just to be the first one to get in so that she would have the longest amount of guaranteed time with Cortland during visitor hours.

As the door opened, I looked up from the records to see who was entering. Morgan was holding the door behind him to make sure it closed quietly, then he smiled lightly at me. I smiled back before looking back down. For a moment, nothing was said between us as he sat beside me. When the silence became awkward, I finally asked him what he found.

“Reid just called,” he gave a half-assed explanation. I raised a brow. “Someone sent the local newspaper a letter claiming to be the Angel Maker.” I chuckled. “Yeah,” he agreed with a short laugh. “He’s authenticating it right now. Hotch wants us to keep working this angle in the meantime. Have you found anything in here?”

I nodded and turned some of the records to face him. “One woman, Shara Carlino, she came to see Cortland nearly  _ every day _ .” I pointed to some of the examples within the visitor’s log that mentioned Shara’s name over and over again.

Morgan grabbed his phone and told me that he would call Garcia for some more information on Shara. “Hey, baby girl,” Morgan said into the phone while grinning ear to ear, “I need you to get me a home or work address for Shara Carlino.” He waited for a moment. Garcia was probably talking his ear off as she searched for Shara’s information. Then, Morgan’s smile faded. “You’re kidding.” Silence. “Nah. Thanks, precious. I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up and looked at me. “She works across the street.”

My jaw dropped. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. She downgraded from being a famous realtor in L.A to a shitty sales job—”

“And something tells me that downgrade has to do with the prison and Cortland.” I stood, quickly gathering up all of the records and throwing them back in the box. “Let’s go.” I stepped around him to lead the way out of the prison.

Once we had collected our guns from the front and made it back to the car, Morgan and I headed to visit Shara Carlino at her place of work. It was a short drive, of course. In about two minutes—if that—we were pulling into the parking lot just outside of her “shitty sales job”, as Morgan put it. We walked straight in and met with a secretary at the front desk. We flashed our badges and asked him where Shara Carlino’s office was, and he led us there. He knocked on the door and told Shara that the FBI had come to see her. I heard her as she sighed before telling us to enter.

“Thank you for seeing us, Ms. Carlino.”

“Well…” She shrugged. She offered us seats in front of her. “How may I help you, Agents?”

“According to the records we looked at, it seemed like you were Angel Maker’s number one fan,” Morgan stated flatly.

Shara chuckled. “No. His name was  _ Cortland _ , and I wasn’t a  _ fan _ .”

“Really?” I cocked a brow. “Then what were you?”

“We were lovers.”

“Last time I checked, death row doesn’t allow conjugal visits.”

“We weren’t physical lovers, Agent Greenaway. It was a spiritual connection. Everything was understood with just one look or one word. There were no secrets between us. It was absolutely blissful. He made me feel alive in a way that no free man ever could.”

Morgan and I both gave each other a glance that sarcastically said: “Okay… then…” I didn’t really understand the appeal of prisoners, especially misogynist serial killers. But he was gone now, and he never hurt anyone else. So… no harm, no foul, I supposed. To each their own.

“Where were you on the sixteenth of this month?” I asked.

“I was away on a business trip with the company. Why?”

“We’re just covering all of our bases, ma’am.”

“You think I had something to do with this?”

“No, but we do think that someone who was very close with Cortland had something to do with this.”

“Well, you can ask anyone here, they’ll confirm my alibi, anyhow.”

“We’ll do that,” Morgan said.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” she slowly started getting sour, “if I’m not under arrest, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Well, we couldn’t argue with that. We weren’t going to arrest her or take her in because we really had no reason to, but we were at least going to check on her alibi first. Maybe then we’d find a reason to continue questioning her. Until then, we had to leave. So, Morgan and I thanked her for meeting with us before we saw ourselves out so that we could go talk to her colleagues.

After we confirmed Shara’s rock solid alibi, Morgan and I headed back out to the car. As we got settled, Morgan didn’t turn on the car. When I asked him what was wrong, Morgan sighed and thought for a second longer before telling me that something was wrong about Cortland’s personal belongings. There was a list in the box that listed everything that was collected from his cell the day he was executed. Like, every single thing—even the weird stuff. But Morgan noticed that a few things were missing, like some paper cranes Cortland made. Originally he thought that it was just that someone accidentally threw them away or something, but he had been churning all of it around in his head, and now he was wondering if someone was selling Cortland’s stuff online, which was how the Unsub got some of Cortland’s semen. It made sense, I guess. Someone smuggled the stuff out in order to make some money off of the Angel Maker.

So we called Garcia with our theory and asked her to look into it for us. She said that she’d use her technological magic to start looking, and she’d get back to us as soon as she could confirm or deny our theory. Until then, Hotch wanted us back at the office. Great. Calling us back when we could just go look for another lead at the prison was a sign that either the team found something really good or really bad… And considering the last thing we heard from them was about the letter they got from the Unsub, I was going to go out on a limb and say it was bad news.

Our stop at the precinct was brief, though. From the moment we got out of the car to meeting with the team inside to leaving again, it was probably all about five minutes or so. It was already getting late, another day come and gone without any viable leads, and there was only one thing the Sheriff could think to do. Since the local newspaper received that letter from the Unsub claiming to be the Angel Maker himself, the town was spiraling into a panic. People wanted to know if Cortland Ryan was really dead. The Sheriff was under pressure to give proof, and we were all trying to tell him that wasn’t the right play. It didn’t seem to matter, though. The Sheriff made the call to dig up the body, and Hotch ordered that Emily and I would go with him to see, while the rest of the team would head to the hotel for the night.

It was absolutely preposterous that anyone could think that Cortland was still alive. I mean, there were witnesses at his execution, and there were professionals that confirmed that he was gone, people were there to see him be buried. To theorize that he was still alive and back to terrorize the town was just… It was  _ out there _ . But we were only on this case because the Sheriff invited us in. We could consult that he shouldn’t dig up Cortland, but it was ultimately his decision, and there seemed to be no way to convince him not to do it.

When we arrived at the cemetery, there was already a crew there, digging up the body. There were yellow work lights on stands surrounding Cortland Ryan’s grave, about three workers already moving about, and one small excavator machine just waiting for the go ahead from the Sheriff to pull the casket out. Hotch kept trying to convince him that this was all a bad idea. To be fair, it was a  _ shit _ idea. By digging up Cortland’s body, we were playing right into the Unsub’s hand, which would just encourage him to kill more on Cortland’s behalf. I mean, there was no way in hell that they body wasn’t there, so, realistically, this would help get the public off our backs— which was the Sheriff’s point in the first place—but if there was any chance there was something wrong with the body in that casket, things were going to get  _ much _ worse for us.

The Sheriff told off Hotch one last time before gesturing to the man in the excavator. We all fell silent in order to watch. The machine started moving up, pulling at the chain attached to it. As the chain went taught, a loud creaking sound screeched around us. The casket budged in the grave slightly. They gave it another tug with the machine, and it gave another screen, which was finally when it started moving out of the grave. As the casket was lifted, it scraped against the metal walls, and the machine itself was rusty and old, so it also gave off a high pitched, shrill cry that made my ears hurt. As I cringed, I clocked Hotch out of the corner of my eye as he pressed his palms to his ears and stumbled back.

I furrowed my brows and followed him. “Aaron—” He kept walking away from me. “Aaron, stop!” I skipped a few steps to catch up to him. “Aaron.” I cupped my hands on his elbows and crouched slightly so that my face was in his field of view. He was staring at the ground while stretching his jaw to (probably) make the ringing in his ears stop. It was like New York all over again. “Aaron, what is it?”

“It’s just my headache,” he insisted quietly.

I looked over at Emily, Rossi, and the Sheriff. They were all watching us, even though they should’ve been paying attention to the casket that was finally being carefully set down on the grass. I let go of him and stood up straight. The three of them looked away from us long enough for me to sneak my hands up to Hotch’s face. I made him stare right into my eyes. Neither of us said anything as I tried to get a read on him from his dry lips, his racing eyes, his shortness of breath, and his weak limbs. He  _ was _ lying to me. He wasn’t as healthy and perfect as he had been claiming. And this certainly wasn’t a fucking headache. I needed him to tell me the truth, but before I could pry for answers, I heard Rossi, Emily, and the Sheriff all gasp and curse under their breaths.

I let go of Hotch again before we both hurried over. We leaned forward slightly to look into the casket, and what I saw made my stomach churn. Cortland wasn’t there. There wasn’t a single body—or, hell, even a  _ hint _ that a body had been in there in the first place. I sighed. What the fuck were we supposed to do now? The locals were going to have a million and one questions, the Sheriff was probably going to crack under all of this pressure, the news was going to have a field day, and the Unsub was going to be so happy we played his game that he was going to start killing more just to keep up the ruse of “Cortland Ryan, the Angel Maker, back from the grave to kill everyone!”, and a lot more women were going to die because of it.

* * *

Hotch didn’t sleep that night. I tried staying up as late as I could with him while working the case, but at some point, the caffeine stopped working, and my eyelids got too heavy to keep fighting. My exhaustion reached the extent that Hotch had to grab my pajamas from my go-back and help me into them because if it were up to me, I would’ve just gone to sleep in my work clothes. Hotch wouldn’t let me do that, though. So, he helped me get ready, and he tucked me into bed, kissed me goodnight, then turned off all the lights except for the small lamp on the desk so that he could keep working.

I felt somewhat sorry, to be fair. This case wasn’t just for Hotch to work on his own. He had been proving that something was off, and I should’ve stayed up all night with him, no matter how tired I got. But I just couldn’t. Besides, Hotch would have rathered that I were in tip-top shape for a long day’s work, than stay up all night running into the same walls we had been facing with the case all day. Sleep was good. Sleep was healthy. That was why I wished Hotch would’ve joined me, but since finding out that Cortland’s body wasn’t where it was supposed to be, I understood that he wouldn’t rest until this case was through. Fair enough.

In the morning, he woke me up and gave me a cup of coffee to get my day started. I sat up and kissed him. He pressed into our kiss lightly for a moment before handing me the cup and escaping into the bathroom. As the water started running, I heard him tell me that he wanted me and Morgan to keep up with the potential lead of finding whoever was selling Cortland’s things on the internet for profit. When I argued that we wouldn’t be able to do anything until Garcia reached out to us, he said that we should just focus on the profile until then.

I snickered to myself. “Ha. Easier said than done,” I whispered under my breath as I brought the rim of the paper coffee cup to my lips.

Then, when Hotch got out of the shower, I pushed into the bathroom to get ready. He snuck up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and kissed my neck again and again until it started tickling and I laughed while brushing my teeth. Hotch finally gave up with one last passionate kiss. I watched him walk into the bedroom, pulling off his towel so that he could get dressed.

“Don’t be shy, turn around,” I snickered before spitting the toothpaste into the sink.

Hotch glanced over his shoulder at me. “You wish.”

“Mhm.”

And then my phone started ringing. Hotch let the band of his boxers snap slightly against his hips before reaching over to grab it for me. He brought it to the bathroom. “It’s Garcia.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” I cheered to the universe before kissing his cheek as we exchanged the phone and I pushed past him. “Garcia, give me some good news, please.”

Garcia chuckled over the phone. “Well, sunshine, I’ve got your lead… Is that good news?” I hummed a “yes” while picking up a pen off the desk so that I could scribble down notes. “I tracked down who has been selling Cortland’s stuff on the internet. Drum roll, please! A man by the name of Sid Rutledge.”

I chortled. “You’re kidding.”

“What? You know him or something?”

“Yeah. He’s the guard at Hawksville Prison that was helping me and Morgan.”

“Well, it turns out that he’s not exactly that helpful to the justice system. He didn’t show up for work today.”

“Do you have a home address?”

“Ready when you are.”

I started writing down the address as Garcia gave it to me. Hotch was now dressed and ready for the day by the time I hung up with Garcia and tore the page out of the notebook. Hotch grabbed the page from me so that I could get dressed. I explained everything to him while getting dressed. I told him who Rutledge was, how he always creeped me out, that he seemed more concerned about keeping an eye on Morgan (a black man) over me (a doe eyed white woman). He was the poster child for racist, sexist asshole. I supposed that it made sense that he was helping Cortland this whole time.

When I was ready, I took the paper back from Hotch. We approached the door to the hotel room together, taking a moment to stand close to each other and stare for a moment because our time together was never guaranteed. Since New York, we had been trying to make the best of every second we had. We always knew that our jobs were dangerous, and there was always a chance that we could lose each other in the field, but those near-death experiences made it more real, and it was terrifying. So I craned my neck up at Hotch while taking in every detail of his face. From his black hair that hung in his face as he looked down at me, to the mole on his cheek, his thin pressed lips, his smile lines, his thick brows, his sharp jawline, everything. He was so perfect. He was so handsome, so gorgeous, so sexy, so lovable. And he was all mine. I would never forget that. He was mine and I was his, and I was just waiting for him to finally make it official.

“I’ll get Morgan,” I whispered, afraid to raise my voice, thinking that it would spook him off somehow. “We’ll go check out Rutledge’s place.”

Hotch reached out and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Be safe for me.”

I nuzzled against his touch. “I’ll try.”

He leaned down to kiss me passionately. The second his lips were on mine, I felt myself melt. If it weren’t for his hand cupping my cheek, I thought that I might have actually collapsed right then and there because of how light and loving the kiss was. He wasn’t being rough, dominant, and possessive with me. He was kissing me in a way that said: “Come back to me for more.” And I just  _ knew _ that I  _ had _ to get back to him.

Hotch blindly reached for the doorknob while we were still kissing deeply. He was practically towering over me, and I had to grab onto his jacket to maintain my balance. But the second the door was open, we tore away from each other. I fixed his jacket before stepping around him. In the hallway, he went to the right to head towards the elevators, meanwhile I headed to the left to knock on Morgan’s door.

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!” I teased while knocking an annoying number of times.

Morgan opened the door to make me stop. “Jesus, what do you want?” He was dressed and ready, but he still seemed cranky.

“Late night?”

“I was working until about four. You?”

“Two.”

“I hate you.” He stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. “What is it?”

“Garcia got our lead on the internet seller. Sid Rutledge—the guard from yesterday— he’s the one who’s been selling everything. Here’s the address,” I said while handing the paper to him. He took it from me. We both started walking towards the elevator as he took note of the address. “You want the honors of arresting him?”

Morgan smirked at me as we stepped into the elevator. “I’d love nothing more.”

Nearly twenty minutes later, as we were pulling up to Sid Rutledge’s house, I grabbed two FBI vests from the back of the car. Morgan put the car in park, and I handed him one. Rutledge seemed like a pussy, if I were being honest, but we were going up to a  _ prison guard _ , and we were going to attempt to arrest him. He wouldn’t exactly be too happy with us. Wearing vests was just a precaution, and since Morgan scared the shit out of me in New York, he had to wear the damn vest whenever I made him.

During our approach up to the house, I had to be sure to step around all of the dog shit on the sidewalk. Sid must’ve had a huge dog that he didn’t clean up after. Then, I let Morgan take the lead with knocking since I promised that he could be the one to arrest Rutledge. Since meeting him at the prison yesterday, Rutledge’s appearance just kept getting worse. I mean, he started out looking like a shmuck. But then it turned out that he was racist, sexist, and who knew what else; and now we were arresting him for smuggling shit out of prison, selling it on the internet, then having the audacity to lie to Federal Agents during a Federal Investigation. I wondered which judge on planet Earth would be  _ lenient _ with him.

“Woah—” I stopped Morgan from moving by grabbing onto the back of his shirt once I noticed that the door was open. “Two deadbolts and neither of them are locked.”

For a guy like Rutledge who worked in a prison long enough to see all the different kinds of evil that existed out in the world, there was no way he left his door unlocked. If I worked in a prison, I wouldn’t leave my door open, either. If there were ever any prisoner who didn’t see eye to eye with me then got released… yeah… So, of course Rutledge would lock both of those deadbolts. The fact that they weren’t locked was a fair reason to worry.

Morgan nodded knowingly. We both pulled out our weapons, and then I followed his lead into the house. “Sid? It’s the FBI… From yesterday… Sid, we’re coming in.”

Morgan gestured towards the kitchen, so I started making my way there. Morgan kept moving slowly towards the bedroom. The living room we were in was entirely clear, so I stepped into the kitchen, but it was also empty. Well, not  _ empty _ . It was the dirtiest kitchen I had ever seen, but, then again, Rutledge didn’t seem like a  _ put together _ kind of person.

“Y/N,” Morgan called calmly from the bedroom. “We’ve got a problem.”

I sighed and holstered my weapon. I knew what that meant. Rutledge was our only remaining lead thus far, and if he were really dead, as I expected him to be based on Morgan’s tone, then we were utterly fucked. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that—

Shit.

Rutledge was lying dead on his messy twin sized bed. The sheets looked like they hadn’t been washed in… Well… Frankly, forever. Just like the kitchen, it was so messy in the bedroom that we could hardly walk around. Rutledge was a huge hoarder, so there were boxes, food containers, candy wrappers, and used condoms  _ everywhere _ . I honestly had no fucking clue who would sleep with  _ him _ , especially in a place like this. But who was I to judge. What was truly eye catching, however, was the overkill stab wounds on Rutledge’s chest and crotch. It certainly was the same M.O. of the copycat—bar the fact that this was not a female victim. The stabbing, the open windows, everything… But his arms weren’t crossed over his chest to symbolize innocence or regret. The overkill of the stabbing, and the fact that his arms weren’t crossed, all indicated to me that this wasn’t about the Angel Maker. I was sure that the copycat did this, but not for the same reason he had been killing the other victims. Rutledge probably sold the semen—and maybe other things—to the Unsub. He probably knew who we were looking for, therefore he had to die in order to keep him quiet.

“This is complete overkill,” Morgan stated the obvious.

“And it’s personal,” I added. “This isn’t about completing the Angel Maker’s vision, it’s about revenge.”

I walked into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet. There was Motrin, TUMS, Advil, medication for his hyperthyroid, but that was about it. Nothing too special. What was on the counter, however, was an entirely different story. My jaw dropped as I picked up the orange pill bottle. That was new and interesting.

“Oh, yeah, definitely personal.” I brought the bottle back to the bedroom and held it out for Morgan. “Viagra.”

If this was personal—which it certainly fucking was—then the Viagra just smacked us across the face to tell us that we got our whole profile wrong thus far. This whole time, we had been focused on looking for a male Unsub who was obsessed with the Angel Maker’s  _ work _ ; but we never stopped to think that this was a female obsessed with the  _ Angel Maker _ . Our profile was off before… But now we had a better idea of who we were dealing with. The Viagra indicated that the Unsub was obviously sleeping with Rutledge, yet the stab to the groin told us that it wasn’t exactly a… consensual experience. I mean, it could have been, but not in the traditional sense. Obviously, our Unsub wanted Cortland, whom she couldn’t have, and if she was the one getting the semen out of the prison through Rutledge, it was possible that having sex with him was payment for keeping their secret quiet.

“I’ll call Hotch,” Morgan said.

“Tell him to give the profile without us.”

“You sure?”

I nodded and turned back into the bathroom to keep digging. “We still need to find everything he was selling.”

Besides, we knew the profile now, and that was all that mattered. We didn’t need to waste our time by leaving the crime scene to go help present the profile to the local P.D., then head back out into the field to do more work. Our time was better spent where we were. That being said, I still needed to churn the profile over in my mind a few times.

Now that we knew that our Unsub was a woman, a few things changed. Our age profile, for example, narrowed down because the only kind of person who would do all of this for Cortland was someone who was madly in love with him. Someone like Shara Carlino. If she didn’t have the most bulletproof alibi I’d ever seen, she would’ve been my first visit after leaving Rutledge’s house. So, if she were in love with him, she had to be around his age—30 or so. The fact that she was female also explained why the bludgeoning of these victims was so different from Cortland’s original M.O. But she was still strong, which told us she wasn’t any younger than 25, and she definitely wasn’t older than 45. Since Cortland was 36, nearly the perfect median, it made sense that our Unsub would be around the same age, too.

Just as I deduced earlier, she likely killed Rutledge because he knew who she was. But what changed now that we had the Viagra bottle was one simple thing: sex. Rutledge was an asshole, obviously. He was an asshole who probably didn’t do things for free. Smuggling and selling Cortland’s things benefitted him financially, but selling the semen to our female Unsub gave him leverage. The Viagra bottle, the way he was half naked on his bed, and the stabbings to his groin, they all pointed to the fact that Rutledge was forcing her to sleep with him in return for the semen and his silence. But now that we were approaching her endgame, he became useless to her. So, she got her revenge. She loved Cortland, she wanted to give her body over to him entirely, not to Rutledge. Sleeping with him probably felt like a betrayal to Cortland. By killing Rutledge, she was apologizing to Cortland… In some fucked up way. But this was all fucked up, so.

All of her behaviors pointed to her being a groupie. For context, groupies were  _ a thousand times worse _ than your average fan. She was on a mission. Her whole life was now about completing the Angel Maker’s work because it was the only thing that could bring him back to life in her mind. She was  _ in love _ with him. That was worse than being a groupie. Love could make anyone do anything. I mean, look at how I practically ran into a bomb zone just to be by Hotch’s side after the explosion in New York. For me, love would make me climb mountains for Hotch. I’d die for Hotch. Our Unsub felt the same way about Cortland; though we differed because she was willing to kill innocent people for Cortland.

“She left something by accident,” Morgan said from the bedroom. I left the bathroom since there was nothing else notable, and I joined him in the bedroom. He was standing up straight after grabbing something off the floor. “A turkey baster.”

“Jesus…” I muttered under my breath.

“What?”

“I’ll bet you anything that’s not leftover gravy in there.”

Morgan shivered and set it down on the bed. Well, at least we knew how she was simulating the sex now. The fact that she accidentally left it  _ here _ was concerning, though. She probably wouldn’t have wasted Cortland’s semen on Rutledge since she viewed it as the most important part of him and her M.O. But she had brought it with her, and it must’ve fallen out of her rape kit. If she brought it with her, that meant she was on her way to—

And then Morgan’s phone started ringing.

“It’s another victim,” I said as he reached to answer it.

Morgan furrowed his brows at me in confusion, then answered. “Yeah, Hotch?” Silence blanketed the room as he waited while listening. “Y/N and I will meet you there. Send CSU here to Rutledge’s place.” Silence again. “Alright. Thanks, Hotch.” He hung up and put his phone away. “You scare me sometimes, Greenaway,” he teased me as we started heading back out to the car.

“You scare me all the time, Morgan.”

“That’s hot.” He laughed and skipped to his car door before I could slug his shoulder with a rough punch.

“You wish.”

“Hey, a man can dream, right?”

“Disgusting.” I pulled my vest off and got in the car. I finally got to punch Morgan once he was sitting down next to me, busy with turning on the car so that we could meet Hotch at the crime scene. “Idiot.” I didn’t even hit him that hard, yet he was pretending like I just smacked him with an iron shovel.

“I’m telling Hotch when we get there.”

“Tattle tale.”

He laughed to himself, then started driving.

When we arrived at the crime scene, we could see Hotch and Emily standing outside of the house with the Sheriff. The police department was surrounding the property with their cars, trying to keep curious neighbors out. Morgan and I made it in without hassle. When we met up with Hotch and Emily, the Sheriff started reviewing the case with us while walking up towards the house.

“Maxinne Chandler. 28. Lower Cannan native. Single, living alone—”

“How many kids did she have?” Hotch asked after stepping over another kid’s toy in the yard.

“None of her own,” the Sheriff answered. “She ran a daycare out of her. One of her clients, a father, was dropping off his son when they found the body.”

Emily and Hotch continued inside with the Sheriff, but I tugged on Morgan’s sleeve to hold him back. “Morgan, wait… Delilah Grennin and Maxinne Chandler worked from home. They had open door businesses. A jewelry maker and a daycare center. That can’t be coincidence.”

We had been waiting for a second,  _ real _ victim to connect the dots in victimology, and there it was. Our Unsub was going after easy targets. Delilah and Maxinne both had their doors open for strangers, and Rutledge opened his door for her because he was hoping to get some action. It made sense. Cortland went after women that sexually attracted him—hence the rape—but this Unsub’s purpose was to serve Cortland, not gain sexual gratification. Because she didn’t get anything out of forcefully entering the home and pinning the women down, she had to be smarter about it. She would probably come in during the day when the businesses were open, ask to use the bathroom, leave a window open, then sneak in late at night when it was time to strike.

“Let’s tell Hotch,” Morgan offered.

The body was in the bedroom, still on the bed, left untouched in its posed position. Her arms were over her chest, her eyes were closed, there were stab wounds in her stomach, and Emily was talking to the M.E. about the traces of semen found. Hotch was staring at the stab wounds, his arms crossed over his chest. Morgan and I had clearly entered at a bad time, so we waited back for them to finish discussing the scene.

When the M.E. left, Emily and Hotch started hypothesizing together. We still stayed silent. They were working as a team on this, and Morgan and I were anxious to tell them what we had put together as our own little team. One thing at a time.

“Nine puncture marks this time,” Emily said. “It doesn’t look chaotic or disorganized, though.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Can I see your pen?” she asked him while pulling out a small notebook. Hotch agreed and handed it to her. We all stayed quiet as she scribbled something down that was slowly occurring to her. “She did this on purpose… I knew that they felt familiar, but I wasn’t sure how… But look at this—” She turned her notebook around. She had drawn the dots the same exact way the Unsub did, and suddenly all of the pieces were falling into place.

“The Big Dipper?” I questioned.

“No,” she shook her head, “The Dolphin from the Heavenly Waters family.”

Hotch took his pen back. “Tell Reid to go back and reexamine each of the bodies to see if the same connection can be made.” Emily nodded and stepped out to call him. He turned to me and Morgan, “What did you guys discuss outside?”

“We think we found the connection between the victims,” Morgan began.

“They both ran in-home businesses with an open-door policy,” I finished.

Hotch considered for a moment. “It makes sense, I suppose. The Unsub can get in and out during business hours, then comes back later with a ruse or something. She’s small, as we know, and she looks welcoming enough that she’d be invited into the victims’ homes.” He was saying what we already knew, but he was working through it himself, so I didn’t stop him. “Reid’s been working on deciphering some of the letters the prison sent to us from Cortland’s correspondence. Maybe he can use the information of the ruse to narrow down who we’re looking for.”

“I’ll tell Emily so she can let him know,” I offered, stepping out to meet up with her.

* * *

When we got back to the precinct, everyone gathered in the boardroom to start brainstorming. Originally, Rossi would’ve called this our “group think session”, but Hotch had yelled at him a couple of cases ago about calling it that, so it had since ceased. However, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Hotch was all about politics, so he had to maintain face about what our team really did on cases—and the Bureau hated group thinking. Calling it “group thinking” around Hotch was worse than saying that profiling was just guess work. But, realistically, we did group think while we were profiling.

When I first joined the team, Gideon told me that every member of the team offered something new and different. According to him, no one was dead weight. I had always tried to keep that in mind while profiling like this as a group, but it seemed like we had suddenly run into a wall. Without the letters that Reid was working on, there was nothing more we could do, much to his chagrin. I didn’t like taking credit for profiles, because that wasn’t the point, but while skimming the notes of what we had, I couldn’t help but chuckle at how most of this came together because of me and Morgan. Telling Hotch that was also a death wish— even for me. We were a team. No one person was responsible for a profile. But, damn…

“I cracked it!” Reid cheered, running over with a stack of papers. “I deciphered the letters.” He handed them to JJ. “She wasn’t just a fan—They were in love.” I could’ve told him that. “Look—” He gestured to JJ to hand the letters out.

JJ handed Cortland’s letters to Hotch, then she hesitantly handed me the stack from the Unsub. We didn’t look at each other as I took them from her. She walked away from me silently and sat down at the opposite side of the room, putting her hand over her stomach.

I started reading the first one on my stack. “’My dearest Cortland, thank you for writing back to me. The day the verdict was read, we shared a silent moment. I knew then that there was a force willing us together. Every time I see you, I feel warmed as if by the sun; and, yet, I fear that if I come too close, I’ll be consumed by your fire. I long to see you again. Love, your dove.’”

Hotch went next. “’My dove, ever since your visit, I am crazed with thoughts of you. Already you’ve entered my dreams. Each time you appear to me, I’m embraced by a feeling of trust and belief as if I’ve known you all my life. Dreams are not enough, however. I yearn to see your face once more. Come visit me. Yours, Cortland.’”

“’My dearest Cortland, as always, I’m touched by your words, and I  _ do _ long to see you again, but they won’t let me. We’re not supposed to have any connection since the trial. It breaks my heart to think that I may never get to lay eyes on you ever again… Continue writing me, my love, for it’s the only thing that brings me comfort throughout my days now since discovering that I will bring a part of you back into this world. I love you. Your dove.’”

“My secret wife, all appeals have failed. All hope is lost. The guards are celebrating my defeat by clearing out my cell, destroying what memories I have of you. My execution has been set for tomorrow. By the time you read this, I will be gone, and all of you will have of me is what you will bring back. I will be watching you from the stars. I will love you from above until one day we are reunited. I love you.’”

“What do you think she meant by that last line?” Emily questioned.

“The murders?” Morgan hypothesized. “By pretending to be the Angel Maker, she’s revived his memory and the terror in this city.” I chuckled to myself. “What?” he asked, turning to me.

“ _ Boys _ ,” I whispered under my breath. When I realized that all eyes were on me as the team was waiting for an answer, my smile faded. I tapped the paper and said, “She was pregnant.”

Emily looked impressed. “Well, if she really did have his kid, we might be able to track her through birth records. Maybe—”

“Agent Hotchner,” the Sheriff interrupted, storming into the boardroom. “We just got a report that a woman was attacked in her house by a female assailant. The victim’s alright… I can’t say the same for the attacker.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The victim was walking home from work when she was attacked,” the Sheriff answered. “She screamed out for help, and the whole neighborhood ran out to help her.”

“This isn’t our Unsub’s M.O.” I spun in my chair to face Hotch. “It isn’t late at night, she was attacked out in the open—the ritual couldn’t be completed there.”

“Maybe she was rushing to get to the last victim because she knows we’re after here,” Emily offered up.

The Sheriff shrugged. “You can ask her yourself when you get to the crime scene, if you’d like.”

“Y/N, Emily, take this one,” Hotch ordered, nodding out towards the front door.

We nodded, too, and headed out.

Emily jumped into the driver’s seat in one of the SUV’s outside, and I got into the passenger’s seat beside her. We started following the Sheriff to the scene. Allowing him to navigate was faster than following a map and getting lost on our way there. This way, we’d get to the scene as fast as possible—hopefully before the paramedics could take the victim to the hospital. From the description the Sheriff gave, it sounded like the victim wasn’t as hurt as the attacker was, but the paramedics probably still felt like it was best to take her back to the hospital to make sure she was alright. I didn’t blame them. Even if she wasn’t physically injured by the attacker, the shock could do more harm than good.

“So, are you ever going to tell me why you and JJ are on bad terms?” Emily finally asked me while still staring at the road. I sighed. “I know, I know, it’s none of my business. But I love you and JJ equally, and I want to make sure that you’re both alright. But if you tell me again to drop it, I will. I’ll respect that choice. I promise, Y/N.”

I knew she would drop it if I told her to. I knew that her promises meant the world to her, and that she understood a thing or two about keeping secrets. I mean, really, what did I know about Emily? Of course, we were close, and she was a dear friend of mine and Hotch, but she kept a lot of secrets from all of us. She kept a thousand things bottled up, and none of us ever pried. There were rules in our team. We didn’t profile each other, and we didn’t pry when it came to secrets. Hotch and I were different because we had a rule that we wouldn’t keep secrets from each other just to save our own, personal relationship. But I wasn’t required to tell Emily anything, the same way she was never required to tell  _ me _ anything.

The worst part, however, was that I wanted her to know. I wanted her to know the truth the same way I had eagerly anticipated JJ and then Morgan the truth. But I’d been burned one too many times. It didn’t matter that Morgan had since come around, or that he was trying to get me and JJ to apologize to each other… What they initially said to my face  _ hurt _ me. I confided in the two people I thought would understand most, and they both let me down. I wanted JJ to know that Hotch and I were going to get engaged, and that we decided that we wanted to have kids. I wanted her to be the first person to know because she was the only other person on the team who could have possibly understood. But she took my heart from my chest, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. She practically told me that Hotch and I weren’t good for each other—that I shouldn’t take things with him  _ too seriously _ . But what about her and Will, huh? Why did they get to know each other for just a few months, then have a baby, and everyone’s fine with it; but Hotch and I date for a year and have a  _ conversation _ about marriage and kids, and suddenly I’m the bad guy.

I wanted to tell Emily the truth. In a way, I needed to tell her, just to see if her response would be any different than what Morgan and JJ’s were. Emily told me before we flew to Cincinnati that she supported me and Hotch, and that she felt she had no right to judge us. Plenty of people at the office didn’t support our relationship. There was the issue of the age gap, the fact that he had gone through a messy divorce with a kid in the mix, and, oh, yeah, he was my boss. It didn’t matter that the FBI had no rules against our relationship; people still looked down on it anyhow. I wasn’t going to convince people’s minds, but my family—the people I spent every day with at the office and entrusted with my life in the field—should’ve at least given me the courtesy of feigning excitement on my behalf. Morgan was my best friend. Even if he didn’t think mine and Hotch’s relationship would be perfect, he should’ve supported me and my elation. Hotch didn’t hit me, mistreat me, or not love me. Hotch was good to me, and Morgan knew it. If there was any sign that Hotch and I were toxic, then, yeah, Morgan would’ve earned the right to warn me away from marrying Hotch. But this was real life. This was our reality, and the truth was that Hotch was good to me and loved me more than anything. Therefore, Morgan should’ve been on my side from the get-go.

Emily… She… I didn’t know enough about her personal life to make a call on where she would stand on all of this. Would she react like Morgan and JJ? Would she still be adamant that it wasn’t her place to give an opinion? Or would she be excited for me? I wasn’t sure. I hoped that she would be thrilled for me and Hotch, but how could I know for sure? Well… there was really only one way to know. I had to tell her.

“Before the explosion in New York,” I began, “Hotch and I talked about getting married and having kids.” Emily didn’t say or do anything. “We decided that we’re ready.”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. A slight upward curl of her lip slowly became more prominent until she was smiling wide with her teeth showing. My heart jumped in my chest. That was so different to how things went with JJ and Morgan. Neither of them smiled when I told them. But Emily did. She was smiling until she was laughing gleefully, and then she removed one of her hands from the steering wheel so that she could hold my hand.

“That’s so great, Y/N!” she cheered.

I squeezed her hand, a smile slowly forming on my face now, too. “You think so?”

“Of course, I think so!” She waved my hand around. “Hello! You two  _ love _ each other! You two have always been a perfect, happy couple. I was always wondering when the hell he’d get around to finally asking you to marry him. Honestly, when I joined the team and found out that the two of you had only been dating for six months, I was shocked. I thought he would’ve married you the day he met you.”

My smile widened. “Thank you, Emily,” I said in all sincerity, trying to suppress the giddy shake in my leg.

“For what?” she furrowed her brow slightly while smiling at me.

“For believing in us.”

“Is that what this is all about? You and JJ?”

I nodded.

“Oh, Y/N,” she tsked her tongue. “What happened?”

“She and Morgan doubted us. They didn’t think that Hotch and I should get married. They think that we’re rushing things.”

“Screw them.”

I chuckled. “What?”

“Screw them!” she said with more passion. “We love them, they love us—but screw them and what they think about you and Hotch. They don’t know your relationship. No one does but you and Hotch. If the two of you think you’re finally ready, then I say go for it. It’s your choice, not theirs. Once they see how happy you two are while married—even though they should already see it now, the same way I do—then they’ll understand that you made the  _ right choice _ . You and Hotch are adults. Make your choice to be happy, and prove them wrong.”

We were suddenly approaching the crime scene, so Emily released my hand. She set the car in park. The scene was still busy with the paramedics looking at the victim in the back of their ambulance, and the police were trying to keep all of the neighbors back. Because of what the Sheriff told us about how they practically ganged up on the attacker, I was surprised that they hadn’t broken through the barricade yet. The attacker was sitting in the deputy’s car across the street, but from where we were, I couldn’t see who it was. I truly believed that this wasn’t the work of our Unsub. The Sheriff and the team could be suspicious all they wanted, but I had an inkling. Our Unsub wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t risk finishing Cortland’s legacy like this. The last kill would probably be the most important one to her. She would be careful and take her time with the last victim. This… this was all so messy.

Then I saw who was sitting in the car with their hands cuffed behind their back.

“Em,” I said suddenly, stopping in my tracks. She stopped with me once she caught on. “That’s Shara Carlino.” Emily looked confused. “The woman who thought that she was Cortland’s only ‘ _ lover _ ’.”

Emily’s eyebrows raised in shock. “You’re kidding.”

“She’s Cortland’s number one fan. Her alibi is  _ solid _ . She’s not our Unsub. We’re just wasting our time here.”

“Maybe…” She trailed off as she started walking towards the car. “Ms. Carlino,” she said after opening the door, “I’m Agent Prentiss with the FBI. I work with Agent Greenaway. You spoke with them yesterday.” Shara looked over Emily’s shoulder to glance at me. “Why… Why did you do this? We know that you’re not the woman we’re looking for, so why?”

“I just wanted us to be together again…” she cried. Her face was all bruised and bleeding from the mob that jumped on her after she tried killing the victim. Yet she didn’t seem to care. She was crying because she failed to do what our Unsub was doing. She couldn’t connect with Cortland in the same way, and she was furious because of it.

Emily slowly closed the door on Shara and turned to me. “Well…” Well, I was right. We had wasted our time—actually,  _ Shara _ had wasted our time. “That was certainly—”

My phone started ringing, cutting Emily short. My eyes apologized to her for the interruption as I answered. “Morgan…” I growled.

“Sunshine, you’re gonna love me right now,” Morgan cheered on the other end. I rolled my eyes. I was in a bad mood still because of Shara, and not even Morgan’s snippiness could change that, unfortunately. “I’ve got you the name and address of our Unsub.” Okay, the cheered me up a bit. “Chloe Kelcher. She was on the jury during Cortland’s case, and she started visiting him once every six months while in prison so that no one would piece together that they were close.”

“She’s his dove?”

“Yeah. Birth records show that she had a baby about three months ago that died after being born.”

“That’s definitely a trigger.”

“Uh huh. We’re all heading there right now. Looks like we’re closer, but Hotch wants you and Prentiss to meet us there.”

I sighed. “Okay.”

When I hung up, I told Emily everything. She told the Sheriff, and we gave him the address so that we could race there. We turned the lights and sirens on as we left the crime scene. Emily stretched between the front seats we were in so that she could grab two vests for us to wear. Knowing that we were heading to the Unsub’s house, it was best to play it safe. Besides, if I even decided to show up without one, I was sure that Hotch would strap one onto me forcefully anyhow. And while that was normally an appealing idea, I wasn’t in the mood. I hadn’t forgotten about last night. I hadn’t forgotten about the plane ride. I hadn’t forgotten my worry over the fact that I knew that something was wrong, and he was refusing to fess up. That was when I realized that if I showed up and Hotch wasn’t wearing a vest, I was going to strap one onto  _ him _ . Funny how those things worked.

At Chloe Kelcher’s house, the team was gearing up at the cars they brought. Hotch was putting on a vest… Thankfully. Then, when Emily and I got out of the car, he spotted me while making sure his gun was loaded. We exchanged a brief glance as I moved my hair out of my face so that it wouldn’t distract me inside. He was watching me closely. That morning, in the hotel room, he begged me to be safe for him. Since New York, I understood why he was being a little more protective than usual, but this was different. The look in his eyes was different. He was practically begging me to stay in the car, which was preposterous. I would do nothing of the sort. I was a part of this team; I was on this case—it was my  _ job _ to go in there and search the house with them. If he wasn’t going to sit in the car, then neither was I.

So, when everyone was ready to head in, we carefully approached. We were going to do a hard entry—which meant that Morgan was going to kick down the door, then we were all going to disperse into different rooms in order to clear the house. The hope was that we were going to catch Chloe off guard so that we could grab her before she would have a chance to run. With a hard entry, however, there was no time for planning. We didn’t have a chance to stop and account for how many rooms there were to clear ahead of time. But we were used to this. The first ones in the door made their way to the back of the house, while the people in the back cleared the front rooms like the kitchen and the living room. I happened to be towards the back with Emily, so we headed straight for the kitchen. We separated around the table in the middle of the room. She ventured to the left, and I went to check the pantry on the right.

“Clear!” Rossi called out.

“Clear!” Morgan responded.

“Clear!” I added.

“Clear!” Hotch finished up.

I sighed and lowered my weapon to my side. Emily and I moved back into the living room where Rossi, Morgan, and Hotch had also gathered.

“Okay, spread out,” Hotch ordered. “We need to find out what her end game is and where she is before it’s too late.”

I immediately turned towards the hallway where the bedrooms were, and made my way to the last one on the right because Hotch was taking the one on the left. When I stepped in, I stumbled slightly. I hadn’t anticipated what I saw. I thought that it would be just another bedroom, or maybe a home office, or even a goddamn shrine praising Cortland… but this… this caught me off guard. I was standing in a nursery. Like, a baby’s nursery. We knew that she had a baby that she lost, but I… It had been months. I… I wasn’t sure why I was so shocked to find that the nursery was still there and put together.

The walls were painted a light baby blue for a boy, and the ceiling was a dark navy blue to imitate the night sky. The one thing that didn’t surprise me was the glow in the dark stars stickers shaped into The Dove constellation. Expected. She wanted her baby to be raised with a constant reminder that his father was watching over him. That part made sense, I supposed. But what sent a shiver down my spine was the empty cradle with a red dinosaur toy eerily similar to the one Jack and I loved to play with, and the pajama onesie that was laid out next to it. It was like she was still expecting her baby to show up again…

“You okay?” Hotch asked from the door.

Frightened by the sudden intrusion, I jumped in my own skin. When I realized that it was just him, I caught my breath and nodded. He started walking in to take a look around with me. “Note the view,” I snipped, pointing to the ceiling. Hotch glanced quickly. “This is probably the cleanest room in the whole place. Her grief sent her into a spiral of deep depression to the point that she couldn’t keep anything together besides the one thing she had left: hope and love.”

“Do you blame her?” Hotch asked me.

I shook my head. “No.” If I ever lost Hotch, Jack, or a bab— Well… Or anyone else… I wouldn’t know what to do with myself either.

“Did you look in here?”

I turned to see that he was pointing at a wooden chest in the corner of the room. It looked identical to the one we had in our office at home. But I hadn’t really noticed it when I entered the nursery. Even if I had, I figured it was probably just filled with baby toys or diapers or something.

Hotch flipped the top of the chest open. Both of us leaned in with our weapons raised, ready to shoot  _ something _ . I wasn’t sure what we were expecting to shoot in a goddamn wooden chest, but better safe than sorry, especially with this Unsub. But what we found only confused us. Hotch and I lowered and holstered our weapons.

“That…” I sucked in a deep breath. “That explains a lot.”

There was a corpse trapped in there, covered by a loose plastic bag in an poor attempt to preserve it. After finding out that Cortland’s body wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and now finding this corpse in our Unsub’s house— specifically her baby’s nursery, I supposed I shouldn’t have been shocked, honestly. If I were to guess, she somehow got ahold of Cortland’s body just after he was executed. I only assumed that because it didn’t seem like the grave was bothered before we dug him up last night.

“Wonderful,” Rossi said sarcastically as he came into the room. “I assume that’s who I think it is.” Hotch and I both nodded. “Listen, I think I might’ve found something here. It’s a weekly planner,” he explained while handing it to Hotch, “and it has Delilah Grennan and Maxinne Chandler’s names in it on the day of their respective murders.”

“What about today?” I inquired.

He nodded. Faye Landreaux. 162 North Red River Drive. She’s an accountant… Works at home…”

“That’s it,” Hotch agreed, jumping on his toes. The three of us ran out of the nursey. “Let’s move!” he shouted throughout the house. Emily, Reid, and Morgan, and the Sheriff immediately hurried outside to the cars.

Emily and Morgan were with me, Rossi and Reid were with Hotch. Morgan drove, following Hotch and the Sheriff to Faye's house about ten minutes away. It was conveniently nice that it was close… but it was also worrisome because that meant we were at least two steps behind our Unsub, meaning it could’ve been too late already.

When we arrived at Faye’s house, we spotted an extra car in the driveway—and, of course, the license plate was “ANGLMAKR”. How did no one fucking notice that before? How did we not catch that in some kind of records or something? Jesus. Morgan noticed, too, so he ran up to go see if there was anyone or anything inside of it. Meanwhile, the rest of us grouped up to start considering how we should handle this.

“Hotch,” Morgan called in a whisper while jogging over to meet us, “the car’s still warm.”

“And the windows are still closed,” I said, pointing up at the house. “She hasn’t killed her yet.”

If she had, then she would’ve made sure to open the windows to make sure that the soul could leave the house. If anything, she was probably… Well… Worst case scenario was that she was already setting out her rape kit. But we couldn’t know for sure. And if we tried anything, there was a possibility that Chloe would kill her before we could even get into the house.

“Find a way in,” Hotch told Morgan.

“Right,” Morgan agreed before racing off to search the perimeter of the house.

Hotch turned to Emily. “You’re gonna take point talking to Chloe.”

“But the profile says you’re not going to be able to talk her down. She  _ has _ to complete Cortland’s work,” I argued.

“I know, but it’ll occupy her long enough to give Morgan a chance to get in and rescue Faye from inside the house. We just need to buy some time.” He turned to the Sheriff. “I’m gonna need all of your vehicles to quietly pull up to the front of the house, facing forward. On my mark, they’re all going to turn their lights on at the same time. I’m also going to need a megaphone.”

The Sheriff nodded and hurried off to do everything he was told. The rest of us started getting in position on the driveway. Because it was so dark and the streetlights on the road had been blown out, we didn’t need cover as we waited for the Sheriff’s department to pull up all of their cars. I was standing between Hotch and Emily, Reid and Rossi on her other side. When the P.D. was ready, Hotch held up his hand, waiting to give the signal. On the count of three, he dropped his hand. All of the cars suddenly turned on their high beams, lighting up the entire house, definitely alerting Chloe to our presence. Well. Hopefully we didn’t just get Faye and Morgan killed.

“Chloe, this is the FBI,” Emily said into the megaphone. “We know you’re in there.” She looked at me and Hotch. We both shrugged. She could do this if she just had a little more faith in herself. We knew that this wasn’t going to stop Chloe, but it was just going to buy Morgan time, like Hotch said. If Emily just kept talking for a bit longer, we’d be golden. “I know that you think that finishing what Cortland started will somehow bring you closer to him. We both know that’s not true. You’ve been lied to, Chloe. Cortland wasn’t who you really thought he was. I think it’s time you know the truth.” Spencer started scribbling a script for Emily onto a notepad. She nodded an acknowledgement to him before continuing. “Those letters that you think were so special between you and him? Well, he sent them to dozens of other women, too. ‘Without the flesh, there is only the soul.’ Does that sound familiar, Chloe? ‘You don’t need to touch me to feel the love I have for you.’ He said the same exact things to other girls like you, Chloe. He was a liar. He didn’t really love you. He was a narcissist. He  _ couldn’t _ love you.”

A scream from inside the house shook the whole neighborhood. Panic ran through me as I didn’t see Morgan yet, but there was also no sound of gunfire or a struggle—which was good. I just had to know that he was safe. Since New York, I didn’t need to keep worrying about him. He scared the shit out of me with that ambulance stunt. This wasn’t easing my conscience at all. Asshole. Where was he? Why wasn’t he out yet?

And then Emily tapped my arm. I glanced at her quickly to realize that she was staring at the yard to the right of the building. I followed her gaze to see that Morgan was helping Faye along as she limped beside him. He was okay. He looked fine. No cuts, no bruises, no scrapes, no bullet wounds, no blood, nothing. He was safe.

Suddenly, the front door of the house opened. We all watched for movement for a minute before Chloe took a slow step out. She was wearing all black—two sweatshirts and snow pants, all for the sake of making her build look bigger, like a man. In her hand, she was carrying a small revolver.

“Chloe,” Hotch began as we all pulled our weapons, “drop the gun.”

She continued moving towards us, so I put my finger on the trigger. Hotch repeated his order. Chloe looked up at all of us, yet she didn’t stop or listen to Hotch’s order. He tried ordering her again. She hadn’t raised her weapon at us yet, she hadn’t made any sudden movements to give us cause to fire, and she was still far enough that she could surrender. So Hotch tried one last time before I whispered to him that I was waiting for the order. He didn’t seem to hear me, though.

Chloe looked up at the sky and whispered, “I’m coming to you, my love.” And then she started raising her weapon.

The Sheriff got the first shot in before the rest of the team could squeeze their triggers. As I fired, I saw out of the corner of my eye how Hotch stumbled back. I stopped firing so that I could look at him. He was wandering around aimlessly as the team continued to shoot at Chloe to make sure she was down. My eyes softened in concern. Hotch was still stumbling, even when the gunfire ended, and he ran into a car while holding his head between his palms. He was trying to guard his ears from the loud sounds. I spotted the similarities in relation to how he looked in New York. The way he was holding his head, the way he was stumbling around like he didn’t know where he was, and the way he could hardly stand up straight unless he was leaning against that car… My heart started pounding in my chest.

I looked at the team, who was also eyeing Hotch with concern. “Go!” I yelled, shooing them towards Chloe. They took the command without argument. While they moved to see if Chloe was really dead, I hurried over to Hotch to make sure that he was alright. Suddenly, he collapsed onto his knees. Thankfully, I managed to catch him by grabbing onto his elbows, and I held him up against the side of the car.

Hotch was blinking like crazy, looking at nothing specific as he glanced around at everything but me. I grabbed his face to let him know I was there, and he tried to squint and focus on me. “Baby,” I said to him breathlessly. “Baby, what is it?” He still didn’t respond. “Hotch!” I yelled, shaking him.

“I can’t hear anything,” he tried to explain calmly, but his tone was in a panic. He groaned as he hid his face in his hands. “Fuck… I can’t hear anything…” I brushed my fingers through his hair to let him know that I was there with him. “Y/N.” He braced his hands on my shoulders as his sight started to come back.

“I’m right here.” I smiled to make him feel better. “I’m right here.”

His hands squeezed my shoulders, and he stood up tall. “Shit…” he cursed under his breath. He stretched his jaw and his face to help clear his ears. “I’m okay,” he reassured me. I shook my head at him. He clearly wasn’t okay. “I promise.” He pushed past me to meet up with the team again.

I stayed where I was. My jaw was hanging, practically on the floor, and my eyes didn’t even blink. How did this happen? Why? He said he was alright, yet for the past two days, he had proven time and again that something wasn’t right. Ever since getting on the airplane at Quantico, I knew that something was wrong. This… The way he seemed just as dazed and confused as he did the night of the bombing in New York… He had been lying to me this whole time.

* * *

I didn’t sleep that night. Hotch fell asleep fairly quickly after kissing me goodnight and rolling over to face the wall. But I stayed curled up on my side, watching his back. I was worried about him, and I knew that worry wouldn’t allow me to sleep, and it really didn’t. Even when I tried to close my eyes, I would just be tortured by the memories of New York. I saw flashes of the street camera recordings of the bombings, of getting that first call from Garcia when she told us something bad happened, of holding Kate’s back together with my hands, or seeing Hotch collapse in the middle of the hospital, of seeing him as he broke down when he found out Kate didn’t make it out of surgery. It was all killing me.

Then I would think about how Hotch couldn’t seem to hear anything when they were pulling the coffin out of the ground, and when I fired my weapon at Chloe—That was  _ my  _ fault. How did I not realize that I did that? He didn’t have a problem with it until I fired my gun because I was standing right next to him. That one was my fault. I should’ve realized that there was something still going on with his ears, and I should’ve held out. But then she could’ve shot Hotch. He was right in her eyeline, her posture was squared up to shoot him. If she was going to shoot anyone, it was going to be him. I saw her raising her weapon, and I made a choice. I made the  _ right _ choice. It was him or her, and I didn’t hesitate.

Finally, when morning came around, Hotch woke up to the sound of his alarm. He groaned and grabbed his phone to turn it off. Meanwhile, I closed my eyes, ignoring the flashes of nightmares, and pretended to be asleep. I was so worried about him; I didn’t need him worrying about me and how I didn’t fall asleep. Eventually, he turned over to face me, and I felt him put a gentle hand on my arm to wake me up. I gave it a few seconds of him massaging my arm awake before I opened my eyes. He was smiling at me while I pretended to be slowly waking up. I forced myself to smile back at him.

“Wanna shower before we head to meet up with the team?” he asked me quietly, brushing a strand of my hair out of my face.

I shook my head and closed my eyes again. I was trying to silently play it off like I was just tired, and I wanted to sleep in for another few minutes while he showered. It seemed to work because he kissed my temple and carefully slid out of bed. When he was gone and the bathroom door closed, I sat up and I started to think while he showered.

About fifteen minutes later, Hotch stepped out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his hips, another one hanging from his neck as he used one corner to clear the water out from his left ear. I shifted on the bed while thinking about what was underneath that towel and how good he looked while his chest was still dripping beads of water. I had to shake off the thought, knowing that wasn’t what I wanted to do or talk about. I needed to focus on having a real conversation with him that had been weighing on my mind since New York.

He smiled at me. “I wish you would have joined me.”

But I didn’t smile back like I should have. “We need to talk about something.”

His smile disappeared and his forehead wrinkled as his eyebrows raised in worry. “Are you okay?”

I nodded and sat up. Hotch walked over and sat down by my feet. He reached out for me, so I turned onto my knees and crawled over to him. He pulled me onto his lap, his arms wrapped around my torso to hold me close. I tilted my head to the side so that I could press my forehead against his. As his wet chest soaked my pajamas, I thought long and hard about what to say next. There wasn’t enough time to prepare for such a conversation, and I wasn’t even sure if there were words to express exactly how I felt, but I needed to try.

I sighed quietly before taking in a deep breath of bravery. Fuck it. Full send. I just had to be honest. “I need you to be honest with me about what the doctors have been telling you. I didn’t want to pry because I knew that you would tell me when the time was right, but it’s been eating me alive, Aaron. I can’t sleep and I can’t eat because I spend my entire days just worrying about you. Something changed in New York. You didn’t used to keep secrets from me, which is how I know that this is really fucking bad. You would tell me if things are actually okay. So, I need to know the truth before it literally kills me.”

Hotch’s arms tightened around me while he pulled his face away from mine so that he could get a good look at me. I wasn’t smiling, I wasn’t smirking, and I wasn’t having any fun while trying to get answers out of him without having to start an argument. What I needed most was for him to just come out and say the truth, no matter how terrible it could be. Even if he were dying, I wanted to know. Even if he were so healthy that he could do a backflip, I wanted to know. There was something missing from what he had been telling me about his health since New York, and I had enough. He was the love of my life, there was no denying it. There was no one else out there who could love me the way he did, and there was no one out there that I could love with the same intensity that I had for him. But for us to work, he needed to just be honest with me. I could take anything, no matter how horrible. If there was even the slightest chance that I was going to spend the rest of my life with him, I needed to know that I could trust him wholeheartedly and that he shared the same sentiment. If we didn’t trust each other, then what was the point? I wanted him to know everything— hell, he did know everything about me, even the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low. He could show me the same courtesy, couldn’t he?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“For what?” I inquired with worry, pushing his wet hair out of his face.

“I didn’t want to lie, I swear. I thought that I’d be fine, and I just didn’t want to worry you.” He looked at me while he mimicked my actions by brushing my hair out of my face, too. “I’ve been so worried about you since New York. I don’t want you to have another panic attack because of me.”

“Just tell me the truth.”

His gaze fell from my eyes to my shoulder. “I’m technically not supposed to be in the field… The doctor didn’t clear me to fly, and she doesn’t want me to be around loud noises, like gunshots.”

My eyes softened. Why would he lie about something like that? That was nothing to be ashamed of. This was his fucking health— Did he not realize that a fucking doctor told him to not put a strain on his ears and that they likely told him that for a fucking reason? It wasn’t just a  _ suggestion _ as he was taking it to be. They knew what they were fucking talking about and he had blatantly—

I took in a deep breath and tried to relax.

“Maybe I should have listened,” he admitted.

Yeah. Maybe he should have. Just a thought… God, I wanted to smack some sense into him so bad. He probably didn’t realize how frustrating it was to hear that he was going out of his way to hurt himself.

“My ears, they keep ringing to the point that I can’t hear or see anything… And when it happens, I go right back to that night and I can just see myself holding onto Kate while screaming for help that just won’t come. I feel so lost and panicked every time—” He looked at me. “But then you’re there, and you’re holding me just like you are now, and I find my balance and I remember where I am. I remember that I love you and that we’re both okay, and that’s enough to help me calm down.”

I took in another relaxing breath, this time because I knew that he was right. I wanted to be mad at him, but he had the right idea about being held and grounded by each other. Knowing that he was safe and alive was the greatest sedative for the mind and heart.

I tried to ask my next question as calmly as possible because he had been honest with me and that was what I wanted. I didn’t want to punish his honesty by yelling at him, but there was so much anger penting up in my chest, and I needed to let him know one way or another that he had made a huge mistake that didn’t just affect him. So I proceeded cautiously with, “How long have we known each other, Aaron?”

“What? I—”

“A year. We’ve known each other for about a year. In all that time, have you ever doubted that I can take care of myself? Even when the worst thing imaginable happens and you get all worried about me, do you doubt that I can handle any situation life throws at me?”

“Never.”

“So then don’t doubt me when I tell you that what happened in New York is nothing to worry about. I’m not lying to you. It’s the truth. Do you really want to know why I panicked like that?” He nodded slightly. “You fell to the floor and I thought you died. I saw you laying there, and I thought that I had lost you for good. I can’t bear to lose you, Aaron. That’s why I had a panic attack. That’s why I couldn’t breathe. But you were fine, just needed a little fixing up and you were good to go. Now you’re telling me that you’re not fine and that you’re putting yourself in danger? Did you ever stop to consider how I might feel about it? Your health isn’t just for you to worry about, Aaron. You have a family. _ We  _ have a family. What if you were to come home one day and you can’t hear Jack’s laugh anymore, huh? You come home from a case and you can’t hear me tell you how much I love you, or Haley’s trying to tell you something important about Jack that we had to miss while we were gone, and you can’t understand her? You can’t do that, Aaron. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to you, to me, to Jack, the team, or even Haley. There are people who need you to be healthy and safe. We’re relying on it. You can’t just make the decision for yourself that you’re going to disobey the doctor’s orders and then have those around you suffer the consequences.”

“I’m sorry, Y/N.”

“I know you are, baby.” I pressed my lips against his forehead, keeping myself there for a minute. He leaned in and pecked a kiss against my neck. “I just want you to be safe and healthy. Is that too much to ask?” He shook his head. “I.” I kissed his forehead. “Love.” I did it again. “You.” He giggled slightly. “I love you, Aaron Hotchner.”

“I love you, too.” He looked up at me. “I.” He kissed my lips. “Love.” He did it again. “You.” Again. “Y/N Greenaway.” I smiled against his lips. “And I really am sorry. I promise, I won’t lie again. I swear it.” We hugged each other tight as he fell back onto the bed. I laughed and tried to roll off of him, but he held me tight. “You’re not going anywhere.”

* * *

When we were dressed and ready to leave the hotel, Hotch and I headed down to the lobby where the team was waiting for us. We apologized for being late, which earned a snarky remark from Morgan about how Hotch was getting “some action”, and in return, Hotch told him that he’d get to ride back-middle seat in the car as punishment. Morgan’s face fell. I chuckled as I walked past him to claim the front passenger’s seat in the car that Hotch would be driving.

We drove to the precinct first so that Hotch and JJ could wrap up a few things with the Sheriff, since he apparently wanted to discuss something with them in person before the team would get on the jet. Everyone got out of the car to stretch their legs again because they knew that they had a long flight ahead of them, but I did it because I knew that Hotch and I had an even longer trip. After Hotch admitted that he wasn’t clear to fly, I told him that there was no way in hell I was letting him get on that jet home. He told me that he understood, and we discussed how we were going to road trip home. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what we had to do in order to keep him safe.

Hotch and JJ finished talking with the Sheriff and one of Cortland’s original victim’s mother a few minutes later. She handed him a plate of cookies, which he thanked her for. As they all said goodbye to one another, Hotch and JJ slowly started making their way back to us. I pushed myself upright from leaning on the side of the car. Hotch and I exchanged a quick glance. Recognizing the signal, I opened the trunk and grabbed our go-bags while he handed the plate to Emily. When I had our bags, I closed the trunk, and I handed him his black duffle bag.

“You’re not coming?” Emily questioned, following Hotch around with the plate of cookies.

“No,” Hotch shook his head. “We’ve, uh… we’ve decided that we’re gonna drive back.”

“That’s a seven hour drive!”

Hotch looked over at me. I nodded a reassurance. “I… I really shouldn’t be flying.”

Emily looked over at me, too, now. She put two and two together. Knowing that this was something that we had discussed privately, and it was a decision we made together, she decided not to push. She nodded understandingly, then told us to drive safe. Morgan and I exchanged a glance as he got in the car with the rest of the team. I smiled lightly at him. Rossi was the only one who didn’t get in yet. He waited for them to close their doors before approaching me and Hotch.

“You know, I’ve done that drive before,” he said quietly. “There’s a lot of small towns—even more miles of absolute  _ nothing _ . It gets kind of dizzying to spend all those hours on the road without stopping. Maybe you two should stretch the trip out for a day or two. Take a few days off to be yourselves again.”

Hotch nodded. “It’s something we’ve considered.” He reached out to shake Rossi’s hand. “Thanks.”

“Stay safe out there,” he said to Hotch, shaking his hand. “Don’t let him drive,” he joked, pointing at me. We both chuckled together, but Hotch only glared playfully at me. “We’ll be fine without you two for a few days, don’t worry.” He turned to get into the car.

When the whole team was settled in the car, Reid started the ignition. Honestly, I didn’t envy them after knowing that Reid was going to be driving them to the airport. I did feel bad, however, for not joining them, and for potentially not being at work over the next few days… but being with Hotch to make sure that he was okay… that meant more to me than anything else. That was what was important. I didn’t want to lose him, and that included losing  _ any _ part of him, like his hearing. This was the safest thing for him, and I was going to be with him every step of the way, holding his hand as we got through this together.

He was going to hate me over the next few days. If he didn’t know it yet, he was going to learn very quickly that I didn’t appreciate being lied to. When Elle tried lying to me about her pain tolerance after getting shot, I stayed at her house for a bit to baby her, to make sure that she was alright and doing everything the doctor’s told her to do. She grew to dislike me over those two weeks because of that. But she was also the reason I didn’t immediately move in with Hotch, so she kind of had it coming. In Hotch’s case, he lied to me the same way she lied… and, boy, oh, boy, was I going to have a field day with making his life hell to make sure he knew to never lie to me again.

So as the team drove off, I held my hand out in front of me, my palm facing up. Hotch tried lacing his fingers with mine, but I playfully pulled away. “Keys,” I explained.

He furrowed his brows. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m dead serious. Keys, Agent Hotchner.”

He moved his go-bag from his right to left hand so that he could dig into his pockets for the car keys. “I’m perfectly capable of driving,  _ Agent Greenaway _ .”

“No, you’re not.” I took the keys from him. “I love you.” I pressed a quick kiss against his cheek before hurrying off to the driver’s side of the car we were taking. Hotch watched me for a moment. “You can pick your jaw off the floor now,” I said, biting back a laugh, and opening up my car door.

His eyes brightened and a smile crept onto his face. “You’re something else… You know that, right?” I nodded. I could practically see his heart beating in his chest like we were in a damn cartoon or something. “I—” He was at a loss for words, which only made me smile. “I love you.” There it was. “Even though you’re a pain in my ass sometimes,” he mumbled under his breath as he got in the car.

Touché.

I was going to show him just how much of a pain in the ass I could be. Poor Aaron Hotchner had no idea.


	28. BACK TO BASICS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Impregnation kink. Fingering. Oral (fem receiving). Over stimulation. Soft sex. Emotional sex. The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying “good girl”.
> 
> TIMELINE: Right after part twenty-seven.

An uninterrupted, speed limit obeying road trip from Cincinnati to Quantico would have taken me and Hotch about eight hours to complete. The team probably figured that was our plan, but we actually took up Rossi’s advice to take back roads, and to take our time. We chose the long route, which went South, through West Virginia, which added another hour to the “scheduled” trip time. But what should have been only a few hours’ drive quickly turned into a three day adventure. We split up the drive into three days of two to three hours of driving, then stopping in a city to take some time to ourselves. Hell, we even did a little site seeing, even though that wasn’t really our thing. It was just nice to slow down for a bit. With everything that had been going on recently, I liked spending hours stuck inside a car with him, holding his hand, kissing his knuckles, singing along to music that he didn’t know. I enjoyed being in his company because there was a good hour or so in New York where I thought that I would never get moments like these. Every second with him mattered more now. Every fleeting moment was appreciated tenfold. I would never forget that.

On the first day, Hotch and I made a stop in Huntington, West Virginia. We found a hotel to hole up in, and we spent the day just relaxing, sleeping, and eating. We discovered a cute diner around the corner from the place we were staying at, and we learned for ourselves that they had the best milkshakes we ever had. It was there that we called Haley and Jack to let them know that “a case was running a bit longer than anticipated”, and we wouldn’t be home as soon as we thought. Haley was understanding, and just asked that we would call whenever we were about to fly home. She still didn’t know that Hotch wasn’t in good shape, and that was probably for the best. We didn’t want to worry her and Jack. I was already worried to death about him, they didn’t need that pressure, too.

On the second day, we drove from Huntington to Roanoke, Virginia. We knew that the way we planned the trip, it was only going to last three days and two nights, but that was better than nothing. Granted, it was already more than we should’ve taken off, anyhow. We would have to get back to work and Jack sooner than later. Anything more than three days would’ve sent the whole team into disarray. If Rossi were having trouble keeping them from sending out a search party for us already, I couldn’t imagine what would happen after seventy-two hours of not hearing from us. Rossi wouldn’t be able to hold them back very long, and that was alright.

I didn’t let Hotch drive at all. He kept insisting that he wanted to switch off, to give me a break, but I still refused. His hearing wasn’t necessarily getting better, but it wasn’t getting worse anymore, either. If the music were too quiet, he couldn’t hear it. If I mumbled something under my breath, he couldn’t hear it. If his phone started ringing, he couldn’t hear it. He was trying. I could tell that he was spending all of his energy on getting better for me and on acting like everything was normal, but I knew him. I knew when something was wrong, and I knew when he was lying to me. That was why I couldn’t let him drive. It wasn’t safe. Besides, I needed him to just take a break. After the bombing and his surgery, his body was still trying to heal. If he were behind the wheel and needed to make a sudden, calculated move in the case of emergency, I couldn’t trust that he’d actually be able to do it. Therefore, he was forced to sit in the passenger’s seat at all times.

Driving wasn’t the only thing I babied him over. Since telling me the truth about his ears and what the doctors told him, he had shown me the medicine that he was meant to be taking. There were a couple of different pills from his surgery, one to help with his headaches, and there was a bonding agent ear drop bottle— which happened to actually be the most important thing. At first, he insisted that he could do it himself, but when I caught him struggling to get the drops in his ear before we went to bed in Huntington, I made the executive decision that I’d be keeping track of his medication and that he was actually taking it. Hotch was surprisingly squirmy when it came to the drops. When I tried to help him for the first time that night, he fought against me until I sat on his lap and told him to just hold my hips. It managed to calm him down long enough for me to squeeze the drops in and move onto sorting out his pills. He was a little stubborn— actually, _very fucking stubborn_ about me babying him. But I had to keep telling him that this was what happens when he would refuse to take care of himself. He proved that he wasn’t willing to do it, so I was having to do it for him. I didn’t think he appreciated the fact that I was bossing him around when he was used to that being his job in our relationship. I kind of liked it, though.

When we stopped in Roanoke for the second night of our trip, we stopped to grab lunch at a pizza place just a few blocks away from our hotel. After getting our food, I got Hotch’s pills out and started sorting the ones he needed to take in the afternoon, especially the ones he needed to take with food. He reluctantly took them, popping them in his mouth and drowning them down his throat with a swig of iced tea. He wanted a soda, but I glared at him and told him, “Over my dead body”, and I ordered a tea for him instead. Like I said, babying. But it was also like I said, he did this to himself. If he just would’ve obeyed the doctor’s original orders, then I would have never known that something was wrong, and I therefore wouldn’t’ve gotten involved. But now I was worried twice as much as before, and now I was spending all of my time making sure that he was only going to get better, and that he wasn’t going to do anything dumb to put his health in jeopardy again. Drinking a soda wasn’t the end of the world, I knew that. But if he wanted one so damn much, he shouldn’t have lied to me. It was as simple as that.

At the hotel, Hotch and I showered to get rid of the disgusting feel that came with sitting in a car all day. Hotch was taller than me, I’d be the first one to admit that, but that didn’t stop me from trying to wash the back of his hair when he seemed to struggle with that simple task. It was hard to miss how he cringed every time he rose his arms above his head, and how he still had to limp because his right leg wasn’t healed. His arms, chest, and left leg were all working overtime to try to keep up with me and prove that nothing was wrong. Every time he tried to wash his own hair, he’d bring his soapy hands to the front, and he could manage to lather it on slightly before giving up and deciding to let the water just rinse it through the rest of his hair. It wasn’t exactly the most effective way to do it. When I noticed his trick, though, that was when I jumped onto my tip-toes and tried doing it for him. He held my waist in his wet hands to keep me steady while I stretched to run my soapy fingers through his hair. That was much better than whatever the hell it was he was trying to do. It also didn’t hurt that it seemed to relax him.

I kissed him under the water as we spun around to face me so that he could wash the soap out of his hair. “I love you,” I mumbled against his lips. He kissed me harder, ignoring how the soap was dripping down his face. He squinted to make sure it wouldn’t sting his eyes. I smiled and wiped his face with my hands, using the water to help me wash it all away. “There. That’s better.”

He opened his eyes before kissing my cheek. “I love you.”

I reached around him to turn off the water. “Better?” I asked.

Hotch nodded and opened the shower curtain to grab us a towel each. He stepped out first. After he had his towel wrapped around his waist, he held his hand out for me to help me out. When we were both out of the shower, towels tight around our bodies, we headed to the bedroom to get changed into comfortable clothes. Then, when we were done, we crawled onto the bed to lay down for a couple of hours.

Hotch was laying on his back to my right while reading a book that he had picked up at a store a couple of small towns back. I was right beside him, my head tucked under his left arm, my torso pressed against his side as I hugged him close. One of his hands was holding his book open, the other one was on the outside of my left thigh, slowly and lightly rubbing circles over the bare skin. It was meant to be an innocent and comforting touch— and originally it was— but the longer he did it, and the wider the circle got, the more I took notice of how it was anything but innocent. Maybe in his mind he figured it was nothing, but his hands were clearly wandering, and I wasn’t naive.

At first, I tried to just ignore it and stay still in order to not give him the satisfaction of earning a response from me, but when his fingers slid their way up to my hip bone, it sent a chill down my spine that made me shiver and whine quietly. His fingers slid back down to my thigh and continued to circle slowly. Every second that passed, I could feel my stomach twisting into knots and my clit was throbbing with need. I let out a quiet sigh into his side, trying my best to hide it from him. He halted his movements and asked me if something was wrong, but I shook my head insistently, so he continued.

My hand that was flung over his chest and resting on his other side started inching back onto his body. I slid it up to the collar of his shirt and fisted the fabric in my grip as he slid back up to my hip bone again. I whimpered again, but he didn’t stop. He spent a few more agonizingly long seconds on teasing my hip with his fingertips before he laid his entire palm against my thigh, squeezed gently, and pulled my left leg over his. My shorts rode up higher on my thighs and he held me in place like that for a minute.

“Your fingers are cold,” I croaked.

“Maybe you should warm them up for me,” he responded, though he was still focused on his book.

Hotch’s left hand released my thigh and slowly slid down between my legs. I hissed at the feeling of his freezing cold fingers making space for themselves between my warm, shaking thighs. He was so close to where I needed him most. I wondered if he knew that. I wondered to myself if he knew that I was already soaking my panties and I was on the verge of begging for him. Maybe he did, because he began kneading the inside of my right thigh carefully and I finally let out a quiet moan.

“Sir…” I gasped, hiding my face in his side again.

“Shh...” he cooed, “I’m trying to read.”

I whimpered again and tried to pull my left leg off of him, but he trapped my ankle between his calves so that I couldn’t escape. I sighed, knowing that this wasn’t going to be good for me in the long run. Hotch had me stuck in a position that wasn’t realistic for letting me move or giving him access to where I needed him most. He wanted me exactly like that because there were so many ways he could play with me that didn’t include touching me where it would feel the best. He had proven to himself and me that just touching my skin slowly and lightly was enough to set me on fire, and he wasn’t about to give that game up yet.

The hand I had fisted around the collar of his shirt carefully let go. As his hand continued to grope the inside of my right thigh, I moved my hand down his chest, feeling how he tensed at my touch, and I rested it just below his belly button. He stayed tense, but he still didn’t look away from his book. In fact, he used his thumb to flip to the next page rather than tear his hand away from between my thighs to do so. I thought of a thousand different curse words that I wanted to throw at him, but I kept it all to myself as I dared to use my hand to wander down his body further.

“I’m trying to focus,” he said to me. His breath hitched and his hand grabbed my thigh roughly as I ventured under the waistband of his pajamas and felt how hard he was. “Baby…” he mumbled, biting back a moan.

I tried to pull my leg away again, thinking that he had let his guard down enough to allow me to do so, but when I made my attempt, his calves only captured my ankle again and with more force. The moan he had been holding back left his throat as I took his length in my hand and slowly pumped twice. Without warning, he threw his book to the side carelessly and pulled his hand out from between my thighs and used it to pull my own hand off of his length. Holding my wrist, his legs let go of my ankle, and he pushed me onto my back as he shifted on top of me.

He held my wrist against the mattress, but he stared at me with passion rather than uncontrollable lust, unlike what I was so used to. His eyes looked between my eyes and my lips before he finally said what was on his mind, “Can we just…” He swallowed hard. “Can we go back to basics for a second?”

I searched his eyes for a moment to make sure that he was okay. I didn’t want to pressure him into anything, and I certainly didn’t want to push him when he was still physically and emotionally recovering from New York. If he wasn’t ready, then he wasn’t ready. I wasn’t about to make him do anything he didn’t want to. I wanted whatever he wanted. If that meant just going back to cuddling, I was fine with that. If he wanted to fuck me into the mattress until I couldn’t walk, I was fine with that, too. Whatever he wanted. Whatever he needed. I figured that I’d let him take the lead, so I nodded.

Hotch leaned down and kissed me gently, his hand releasing my wrist. Both of his hands were planted on either side of my shoulders now, his knees were resting between mine, and his lips were gently pressed against mine, no tongue yet. My hands went up to his face and I cupped his cheeks earnestly. His hips dipped down and he grinded desperately against me through both of our pants. I moaned into his mouth, finally giving him access to dominate the kiss with his tongue.

He was so hard, and I was so wet. I just needed him inside me… I bucked my hips up against his, a plea for more, and he listened. He balanced his weight on his knees and one hand as he brought the other between us and snaked his fingers to my shorts and panties. He pulled them down with one effortless tug. He smirked as he threw them to the floor. I bit my lip while looking up at him, my eyes following his as he leaned over me again.

“Aaron,” I moaned when his fingers found my clit.

“Manners still,” he begged while grinding his hips down.

“Yes, Sir,” I nodded, holding his face in my hands.

“I love you.”

I swallowed his words as he slid two fingers into me, and I moaned a string of curse words before he kissed me deeply. Every inch of me was on fire— more than before. Hotch hovered over me with his mouth on mine to silence my words, his fingers working in and out of me at an intricately slow pace. They curled as they pumped inside of me slowly again, and as a result, my back arched off the bed, my head falling against my pillow, my eyes screwed shut. I was so used to Hotch either going so painfully slow in order to tease me for hours on end or so fast that as he was racing to catch my orgasms one after the other, I could see stars. There usually wasn’t any in between, and that was fine because it was fun to see where my games with him would land me on the spectrum of punishments to rewards. But this…

My hips bucked again as his thumb pushed against my clit and started rubbing figure eights.

This was absolute bliss and euphoria. He wasn’t trying to tease and edge me or force multiple orgasms out of me. His pace, mixed with the way he would spread and curl his fingers while buried deep inside of me were all for the sake of telling me: “I love you more than the moon loves the stars you see behind your eyelids right now.” And I had never felt more breathless in my life as my orgasm began to approach.

Hotch’s fingers curled right into my g-spot, and once he found it, he didn’t stop going for it. My mouth was agape as the back of my head buried itself further into the pillow underneath, and I cursed and cursed like it was the only thing I knew how to do besides moaning. When his thumb changed page and direction on my clit, that was when I was a goner. Hotch sat all the way back on his heels so that he could use his other hand to hold my hips still as I cried out his name, clenched my walls around his fingers, and came as hard as ever.

He smirked to himself and his little victory as I continued to buck around wildly, despite his attempt to pin me. Next thing I knew, after I had the strength to tell him to wipe that grin off his face, Hotch shrugged and leaned down to replace his thumb on my clit with his tongue. I yelped, thrashing around in response to the sensitivity of my throbbing clit and his unrelenting fingers inside of me.

“I know you can handle it, baby girl,” he whispered before licking a long, slow stripe up from his fingers in my core to my aching clit.

I nodded eagerly. “Yes— Yes, Sir—” Another moan broke away from me just when he added another finger and he spread me open ever so slightly. It certainly didn’t feel like being as full as when his cock was inside of me— nowhere near that length and girth— but when he spread them apart in order to stretch me… Fuck… “Please, Sir.”

“Please what?”

“Please make me cum again for you, Sir.”

“Good girl,” he complimented.

In an instant, his lips wrapped around my clit, and he used a mixture of licking and gentle sucking to set me on fire again. God, I loved learning the U.S. State Capitals. By Denver, my fingers were tangled in Hotch’s hair in order to keep him where he was, a silent plea to make him keep going. And he didn’t stop. Tallahassee sent me over the edge for the second time that night, but he didn’t relent. The three fingers inside of me ignored how hard I was squeezing around them in order to keep rubbing against my g-spot. My orgasm had barely just ended, and I felt the desperate need to cum again; but I just wanted _him_. I wanted every inch of his cock inside of me. Nothing else. I could keep learning the State Capitals all day, but we had only just reached the end of Atlanta and I never needed him more.

“Sir,” I moaned, tugging on his hair lightly to gain his attention. “Fuck me. Please.”

Hotch looked up at me through his lashes, still halfway through Honolulu, and I felt a third orgasm approaching, the knot in my stomach tightening, and my thighs tried pressing together around his head. The ‘B’ in Boise was what did it for me.

“Hotch, please!” I cried out. “Please, baby… Just fuck me. Please.”

Hotch’s fingers stilled inside of me once he was sure that I had come down from my high, then they carefully slid out. I gasped at feeling so empty suddenly but caught my breath when he brought them to my open mouth. I sucked on all three of them, focusing on the task he had given me rather than the fact that he was trying to clean up the mess he made with his tongue, which would surely make me cum again if he just added a little more speed and pressure— which he wouldn’t… but he could… if he wanted to.

He pulled his fingers from my mouth after he finally sat up again. “Baby girl,” he cooed.

“I know. I’m sorry.” I softened my eyes. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to say his name, but it had slipped from me while I was nothing but puddy in his hands and unable to think about literally anything. If I could have, I wouldn’t have said anything to him at all, but my desperation for him had been so strong that I knew that saying his name was a sure way to catch his attention. “It won’t happen again.”

Hotch smiled and tucked some of my hair behind my ear with his dry hand. “You did so well, baby girl,” he complimented. “I’m not mad.” That was a relief. I watched him, my hips still grinding against the mattress with anticipation, while Hotch struggled to get out of his pants. Once they were around his ankles, though, he gave up, figuring that it was good enough since he was just desperate to be inside of me. “I love you,” he whispered while hovering over me.

After I leaned up slightly and grabbed his face in my hands, I whispered, “I love you, too.” And in an instant, I felt his tip circle my clit then slide down to my entrance. “I love you, I love you, I love you…” I kept going as he entered me with everything he had to offer.

He groaned roughly as he bottomed out inside of me. “Fuck, baby girl. How are you still so fucking tight?” He pulled his hips back, nearly pulling out of me entirely, then he slid back in. “God…” he buried his face in the crook of my neck.

There was a point in New York, when Morgan and I were still in the car after getting the call about the bombing and we weren’t sure if Hotch and Kate were involved yet, that I asked myself if I would ever know this feeling again. I was so terrified that I had lost him, and I wondered if I would ever feel the warmth and kindness of his kiss, or if I would ever get to feel at home in his arms, or if I would ever get to feel on cloud 9 with him buried to the hilt inside of me ever again. He was the only person I had ever met who mattered enough to me like that. And the fear of nearly losing him still hadn’t left me yet, but getting the chance to be trapped in his arms as he hugged me close while his hips did all the work and he kissed me as passionately as he could… that was all I could ask for. That was only the tip of the iceberg of what I was scared of losing when I thought I had lost him forever, but I had him, and I wasn’t about to let him go ever again.

Crying during sex was _less than ideal_ normally, but there was something about that evening. Between us, we usually spent our time in the bedroom fucking each other until our games could come to an end and we were entirely worn out. But that evening, there was a silent, mutual understanding that we weren’t there to play or just fuck. This was the truest, strongest way of telling one another: “I love you. I can’t lose you. Ever.” And I felt that with how fried and strained our emotions had been since New York, we were both just… broken, tired, and so grateful to be with one another. So as he lifted his head from my neck and I saw how soft and red his eyes were, so similar to mine, I kissed him before it could get out of hand.

Hotch’s right arm pulled out from underneath my back and he brought his hand to my face. After wiping away a tear from my cheek, and I returned the favor, he drove into me again with a little more force. “I love you so much,” he gasped against my jawline before nibbling down slightly. His cock hit just the right spot after stretching me further than his fingers ever could.

“Shit—” I moaned. “Please… Oh, fuck…”

He was going fast and hard now. Not like usual, but certainly a noticeable improvement from his slow hip thrusts only seconds ago. He was chasing his orgasm now, wanting to cum deep inside of me, and I wanted nothing less than that. He had given so much to me between the gingerly placed touches, the orgasms that just didn’t seem to stop, and showering me in so much love that could last a thousand lifetimes. I wanted _all_ of him. Everything. I didn’t want the kisses to ever stop, I never wanted to leave his arms, and I wanted to feel the fullness he gave me every time.

He huffed as his muscles flexed while holding me. “I’m gonna…” I wiped my hand over his forehead as it wrinkled with concentration. He was so close; I could feel him tensing while his thrusts got increasingly sloppy. “Y/N,” he moaned my name into my mouth, and I begged him to do it again. “Y/N, Y/N, Y/N, Y/N…”

“Aaron—” I whined, almost as a warning. Once again, I was so close to the edge, too.

He let out an animalistic groan as his hold on my check tightened slightly and he came inside of me. I writhed around, holding him tighter, my hands moving to his back and clawing stripes into his skin as I came, too. He held me through our orgasms, moaning with every twitch his cock gave. When he stopped moving, he collapsed slightly, still careful not to crush me. I ran my fingers through his hair, feeling both the sexual and sensual relief waving over me.

He was there. He was with me. He was _in_ me. He loved me. I loved him. We were going to be okay. I wasn’t going to lose him. I wasn’t going to let him go.

“I love you,” I whispered into his ear, feeling his arms snake around me so that he could hug me. “I’m here.”

After taking another moment to just hold me close, Hotch rolled off me, pulling out slowly, then falling onto the bed. His arms continued to stay wrapped around me, keeping me close to his chest as he laid down. He adjusted his head on the pillows, trying to get comfortable. I put my head on his chest, returning to the original cuddle position we had started out in the first place.

“Basics...” I patted his shoulder. “Basics is good.”

He let out a slight chuckle, “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” I sighed, relaxing in his arms once more. I looked up at him slightly. “I love you, Aaron. I feel like I don’t say it enough.”

He pouted his eyes and wiped a tear from my cheek. “Every time you look at me, I know you’re thinking it. When you’re not saying it, I know it. That’s all I can ask for.”

“I love you.” I leaned up and kissed him. “I love you.” I hugged his shoulders. “I love you.” I wrapped my legs around his hips. “I love you.”

He held me close. “I love you.” He kissed me passionately. “I love you.” He grabbed my hips. “I love you.” He flipped us over again. “I love you.” He kissed my lips again. “I love you, Y/N. More than anything.”

We both leaned in for a passionate kiss.

“I love you,” we both said.


	29. PLEASURE IS MY BUSINESS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 4 Episode 16. Five months after part twenty-eight.

Hotch sighed heavily as he brought his hands up to his face to muffle another sigh that followed shortly after. He threw his head back and seemed to cringe slightly. I raised a brow at him, tapping my pen against the report in front of me. Was he tired or did something happen on the call he just got off of? It wasn’t anything work related or else he would have already told me to grab my things and call Haley. Maybe he was just having a long day. We both had a lot of work to do, and we had hoped that we would get to spend _some_ of the day with Jack. We hadn’t anticipated that we’d all be cooped up in the office all day. At one point, there were plans to go on a bike ride before we had to take Jack to Paul Cain’s house for a birthday party, but with how much work Hotch had piled up, none of those plans panned out, unfortunately.

I watched silently as Hotch closed the report he was working on and wiped his face again. Something was definitely wrong, so I pushed myself out of my seat, and wandered over to his desk. As I draped my arms over his shoulders and rested my chin on the top of his head, Hotch dropped his hands from his face to holding my hands against his chest.

“What is it, baby?” I asked quietly, rubbing my palm against his sternum.

“I’m being sent down to Texas to consult on a case.”

I furrowed my brows. “Garcia called?” Why didn’t he say anything sooner? Why weren’t we already racing around to head to the office or the jet?

He squeezed my hands. “No. The Attorney General just wants me to go, apparently. I guess the Director told him that I could help.” I didn’t understand. Why was he being called to consult a case without the team? Hotch sensed that there were questions running through my head, so he tried to explain himself. “They think that my experience as a former prosecutor could help them close a case, but they wouldn’t give me any details about what the case even is.”

“That’s… odd…”

Hotch chuckled agreeingly. “Yeah.” He brought my left hand up to his mouth and he placed a gentle kiss on my knuckles. “They want me to fly down as soon as possible.”

I turned my head down so that my lips replaced the spot on his head where my chin was resting. His hair was still a bit wet from the shower we took earlier… and the one after that. He smelled like his almond shampoo and mint hair gel. It shouldn’t have been a combination that made sense, yet it always worked for him, and I loved it. It calmed me down enough to let me think about what he said. He was being called away again, and Jack and I were going to be alone. It wasn’t ideal, but Hotch had to do what he had to do. I couldn’t stop him from doing his job.

“Then you should go,” I whispered into his hair.

He sighed again, his shoulders falling in defeat against my elbows. “What about you and Jack?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get him to Paul’s birthday party this afternoon, and I’ll help him with whatever homework he has left.”

“Remember, they moved it from—”

“—From two to one. I know. I was there when you got the email.”

Hotch laughed against my hand. “Fair enough.”

“We’ll be fine,” I patted his chest. After fixing his shirt a bit to settle on his chest better, I pulled my arms away from him and stood up straight. Hotch spun around in his chair to pout up at me while I tried to pull him to his feet. “Aaron Hotchner does not _pout_. Come on.”

“If I just hide in here with you guys, I don’t have to go.”

“The Director referred you for this case. You’re going.”

He gave my hand a tug, sending me forward, pulling me onto his lap. I glared at him as I sat down, wrapping my arms around his neck again. “Have I told you that you’re the best?”

“It never hurts to keep reminding me.”

He kissed my neck. “I love you. I’ll try to get home as soon as I can.”

I titled my head so that I could press my forehead to his. “Promise me that you’re just there to consult.”

It had only been six months since the bombing in New York. While to some that might have seemed like a long time to get over something, I didn’t think that Hotch and I were quite the same still. I knew that his ears were still hurting from time to time, and he’d cringe if he bent down a certain way. I just wanted him to be careful out there since I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him. I knew that I wasn’t around all the time before… I mean, Hotch and I technically only _knew_ each other for about a year and a half now. There were years where he was on his own in the field with no one to constantly watch his back and worry about him, and he did fine. It wouldn’t hurt for him to go consult on a case without me. Yet, I was still nervous about him leaving. I couldn’t help but ask myself what would happen if something like New York happened again and I wasn’t there to help him. I didn’t want to have Morgan or Rossi show up on my doorstep to tell me that he was gone or something…

“I promise,” he whispered, his breath hot on my nose.

“I’m serious, Aaron. If your ears start to hurt at all, you should come home—”

“Y/N,” he cooed, brushing some of my hair behind my ear, “I’ll be fine. I _promise_.”

I hugged him tight. “I love you.”

Hotch kissed the tip of my nose, then my lips, then leaned back to get a look at me. He lifted my chin with his index finger. “I love you.”

I patted his shoulders before sliding off his lap, despite his poor attempts to keep me in his arms. When I was free, I reached back to grab his hands again to pull him to his feet. This time, Hotch let me do so, though not with ease. He slacked his arms and tried to push his weight down into his chair, but I managed to get enough momentum and a good angle, which managed to somehow pull him to his feet. He stumbled forward slightly, trying to catch me in his arms as he continued to pout. I dodged his attempt by ducking under his arm and stepping out of the way. He whined.

I squinted at him. “You’re being a baby, Aaron.”

“Do you blame me for not wanting to leave?”

“No,” I shook my head, “but I think you need to grow up, go help with this case, then get back to me as fast as you can.”

“Hmm? Why’s that?” he smirked.

“I added something to the black box.”

His eyes widened. “And you’re telling me this _now_?”

I smirked. “Come home and you’ll find out what it is.”

“I hate you.”

“Mhm. I’m sure.”

He licked his teeth, sucking back the urge to just pin me against the wall then and there. “Fine. But I won’t be nice when I get back.”

“I expect nothing less.”

While Hotch stepped out of the office to go pack a new go-bag for his trip, I went over to the chest in the corner of the room. I kneeled down and opened it up to grab mine and Jack’s favorite red triceratops toy, since he had left it in there earlier. When I closed the chest, I heard Jack running out of his bedroom like he could sense what I was doing. He sprinted into the office, struggling to come to a slow and steady stop in his fit of excitement. I laughed at him as he crashed into my arms for a Superman hug.

“Do you and Dad need me to work the case with you?” he asked ecstatically.

I swept him off his feet and gave him his red dinosaur so that I could hold him with both arms. “Dad’s actually leaving for a case right now. I figured that we could give him something to remind him of us while he’s gone.”

“Why?”

“Because I know how much we can miss him when he goes on his own. This way, it’s like we’re still with him.”

It was total bullshit, but I remembered the last time Hotch left for a case without me and it felt nearly impossible to even breathe. With how much I had been worrying about him since New York, I just needed a little false comfort like believing that sending him off with our favorite dinosaur would somehow keep him safe. Besides, it would have been nice for Hotch, too. He clearly didn’t want to be away from us, so maybe the toy would help.

“Does that sound okay?” I asked him. Jack nodded in response. “Alright. Let’s go say bye to him and then we’ll head to Paul’s birthday party.” I set him back down on his feet and followed him out of the office.

When we approached the steps, Jack started going down them one at a time while counting them. He had a habit of doing that whenever other people were around because he was trying to prove to me and Hotch that he was learning how to count, and that he was good at it. I thought it was adorable, but Hotch, who was waiting just behind us, wasn’t too happy. He was in a rush, and Jack was being slow. As much as he loved his son, he was clearly annoyed. That was my fault. I’d take the blame for that one. Bringing up the black box before Hotch had to leave for a case was a calculated move on my behalf, but it got him on edge, and he’d be like that until he was in Texas and focused on the case he was consulting on.

Thankfully, Jack finally finished jumping down each of the steps, and Hotch managed to step around me so that he could swipe Jack off his feet and into his arms. As he carried Jack to the door, he kissed and hugged his son close, promising that he’d be back before Jack could notice. Jack gave his dad a Superman hug and whispered an “I love you” into his ear. When they parted, I nudged Jack. He looked at me for a moment, then remembered that we were supposed to give Hotch the Red, our dinosaur, so he handed it to his dad and explained that it was for him to hold onto a part of us while he was gone. Hotch kissed Jack’s cheek again, then let him down.

Hotch put his go-bag down on the ground and caught me as I jumped into his arms. I squeezed his shoulders with the same kind of Superman hug Jack gave him. I knew that I told him to leave, that this was what he had to do, but I still wished that he didn’t have to go. At some point, I could just hold him in my arms long enough to make him stay with me forever. I loved him. I worried about him. I needed him. Why did he always have to leave?

“No spoiling him.”

“I won’t.” I smirked against his neck.

“I mean it. You can’t always be the cool parent.”

“You’re already late to that race, Agent Hotchner.”

He dropped me out of his arms. “I was early to the race; I don’t know what you mean.” He gently pinched my chin between his thumb and index finger, making me look up at him. “I love you.” He leaned in and kissed me lightly, our lips barely touching. I wasn’t having that, though. I pressed against him harder, forcing him to kiss me deeply and passionately. “I love you,” he repeated.

“I love you so much,” I said, pressing my forehead against his. “Promise me again it’s just a consultation.”

“It’s just a consultation.”

“And you’ll come home if you feel bad again?”

“Y/N—”

“Promise me.”

Hotch sucked in a quiet breath. “Okay. I promise.” He kissed me quickly before reaching for the door. He knew that if he stayed even a moment longer, one of us would convince him to stay, and that wasn’t what he needed. “I love you, baby.”

I followed him to the door. “I love you.” I watched as he walked towards the car. “Hey!” I called when he was about to get in. He looked at me. “Don’t forget that there’s a gift waiting for you when you get home!”

Hotch looked around our street to make sure no one heard that. “They’re going to be the death of me,” I heard him mumble as he slid into the driver’s seat.

“Alright, Jack!” I called out, closing the front door. “Are you ready to head to Paul’s?”

Jack came running back over towards the door, now wearing his light up Sketchers. I caught him in my arms and playfully groaned to make him think he was bigger than he actually was. I kissed his cheek as I reached for the gift wrapped in Captain America gift paper. Hotch and I took Jack to Toys R Us the other day to look for a present for Paul. Jack ran up and down the aisles for about twenty minutes before landing on a Lego set (that he also wanted for himself, “oddly enough”).

Now it was just a matter of getting through the next few hours of hell without Hotch. I thought this party was going to be easy because I would have Hotch there with me to introduce me to all of the parents, to keep me company if I felt uncomfortable or left out, to give me backup on forcing Jack to leave after about three hours or so. I was nervous to be doing all of that on my own. Jack was always an excited kid. We were going to get there, and he was going to race off and insist to stay all afternoon. I was going to be all alone. I knew I shouldn’t have been thinking selfishly like that when it came to a kid’s birthday party, but I didn’t know what else to do. Putting a smile on for Hotch was easy enough just to convince him to go, but now that he was gone, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. No matter what, though, I had to bear and grin it for Jack.

So, as we pulled up to Paul’s house, I swallowed my pride and walked Jack inside. The second Jack saw his friends running around in the backyard, he shoved the gift in my hands, then hurried off on his little legs. I sighed and set the present down on the gift table near the door. That was when I heard someone call my name. I jumped in my own skin while looking up and around to see who had called for me. I didn’t think anyone would know me there. And then I almost wished that no one did know me there.

“Hi, Haley,” I said with a smile and a wave.

“Where’s Aaron?” she asked, approaching me, despite the large jugs of sodas in her hands that were meant for the kitchen.

I looked around myself, as if Hotch would somehow suddenly appear. As I was reminded that I was alone, I whimpered quietly before slapping my faux smile back on. This was my own personal hell. It was one thing to remind myself that Haley was always nice to me when we would _briefly_ meet each other while exchanging Jack; but it was entirely different to think that I would have to spend the afternoon with her because she was the only face at the party that I recognized. I knew I told Hotch to go, but I was still going to kill him for leaving me. He could have at least warned me that Haley was going to be there. Though, I supposed I should’ve known. Paul’s mom and Haley were good friends. Like, so close that she took Haley’s side in the divorce and wouldn’t let Jack hang out with Paul whenever Hotch was at his house. That was a long time ago though. It seemed that she had since come around, considering I was there.

“He got called away,” I explained. “Do you want help with those?” I gestured to the sodas slipping in her arms.

Haley looked to see my reference, then laughed nervously. “Sure. That would be great.” She handed one to me so that her arms were free. “So, he got called away, but you didn’t?”

“It’s just a consultation.”

“Mhm. I’m sure.” Haley started leading me through the house. When we turned into the kitchen, I saw that all of the parents were gathered around the window, watching their children play together in the yard. I froze in my tracks. “Everyone, this is Y/N, Aaron’s…” she hesitated for a moment. “Aaron’s _partner_.” She set the sodas down on the kitchen island as all of the parents turned to face us. “Y/N, this is Susan, Paul’s mom.”

I gulped. “Hi.”

Susan, the tall, skinny, plastic boob, blonde, trophy wife, smiled politely at me before sipping on her wine.

“Here, I’ll take that,” Haley offered, already grabbing the jug of soda from me because I was still frozen in place. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to me, “Jack’ll get tired in about an hour or two, and he’ll actually beg you to take him home.”

I chuckled quietly. “Okay.”

As all of the parents moved out of the kitchen in order to get away from me, Haley started cutting the huge birthday cake on the counter into small square shaped servings for all of the kids. She explained that Susan’s hands were already shaking, so she’d been running around to do everything. “It’s the least I can do for her,” she explained to me. Susan was the only one there for her after Aaron caught her and… Well, she never gave me a name. But what she admitted took me by surprise. Hotch never told me about that. I mean, _ever_. As far as I was aware, they split up because the job got in the way— which was why we were so grateful to find each other because we understood the pressures and the schedules. But Haley cheating? I never knew that. I never even expected someone like Haley to admit that. Then again, it had been so long, she probably understood her mistakes, and she had come to terms with the fact that she lost Hotch and there was no getting him back. Admitting it was part of the process.

“Can I tell you something?” Haley asked me quietly. I vaguely nodded. “I was really upset when Dave called to tell me about the bombing in New York.” My heart wrenched in my chest. “I was upset because Aaron didn’t have the decency to call me and tell me what happened. I had to hear about it months after the fact from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in years.”

“I’m so sorry, Haley.”

She shook her head like it wasn’t something that I could apologize for. “You know that I still love him, right?” I nodded again. “But he loves you more than he ever loved me—and that’s okay. I don’t mind that. I know that I messed up. I know that it was my fault, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. But…” She bit her lip briefly. “Could you do me the favor of making sure that I know what’s going on? It’s hard for me to look my son in the eye and say that his dad’s alright when I don’t know if that’s the truth. He’s happy with you, that’s not what I’m concerned about. What I am concerned about is the one thing we can’t control— no matter how hard we try— his safety.” She set the knife down and looked at me. “When bad things happen, could you let me know? That’s all I’ll ever ask of you. I know I don’t have to make you promise that you’ll love Aaron and Jack unconditionally because you already do that yourself. I just want to know that he’s safe. Can you do that?”

I softened my eyes and nodded through a croaked, “Yes,” response. Haley went back to cutting up the cake. “There’s, um… There’s something you should know, then.” She cocked a brow at me, so I cautiously carried on. “After New York, he lied to me, too.” I moved around the kitchen to fill a cup of soda for myself in order to keep my mind and hands occupied. “He told me that he was okay, so he went back to work.”

Haley scoffed quietly.

I eyed her through my lashes. She wasn’t surprised that he had lied about his wellbeing just to get back to work as fast as possible. To be frank, I didn’t like her response. Though it was eerily similar to how I felt, knowing what I knew now about her, I was less than impressed with her allowing him to think that his job was what got between them. I didn’t mention it to her, though.

“We called you from Cincinnati about five months ago; do you remember?”

“Yeah. You guys called to say that the case was running long.”

I shook my head. “I found out that he was lying about his ears— that he wasn’t cleared to be around loud noises or on the jet. So, we decided to drive home. We, um… We took the long route, and we took a few days off from work.”

“Miracles _do_ happen,” she whispered under her breath.

“What?”

She halted her actions when she realized that I heard her. Knowing that she had no choice but to explain herself, she said, “Well, you know, he never really takes time off work. It’s a miracle if he even gets an afternoon to _himself_.”

“No, I don’t know.”

We stared at each other blankly for a moment.

Hotch and I spent plenty of time together outside of work. We took the weekends off— if we weren’t called away on a case— we would go out for lunch, we would go home every night to see Jack because we had custody whenever we were in town, and we made wholehearted efforts to spend every chance possible with Jack. For Hotch, he actually took a lot of time off work. Granted, we hardly got to do what we did with Cincinnati, but still. There were times when we could unplug. There were times when we could afford to not pick up JJ’s calls every once in a while. So, no, I didn’t understand what Haley was saying. Maybe for her, Hotch’s schedule didn’t meet her expectations while they were still married. You know, the early mornings, the late nights, the random trips, the unsafe field work, the copious amounts of paperwork. All of that probably wasn’t how she saw her life turning out when she looked at him and said “I do” in front of all of their friends and family.

But I was fine with how Hotch and I worked things out. We practically got to spend all of our time together—or as much time as we _wanted_ to spend together. We worked in the field when we wanted, we did paperwork together at home, then we would leave it all in the back of our minds when we would go out for lunches and he would tease my ankles, or when we would sit down for dinner with Jack and I’d sneak him an extra bite of dessert while Hotch was busy with something in the kitchen. There was a time and place for work, and there was a time and place for everything else. Work: the office and the field. Everything else: home with Jack, and the bedroom with just the two of us. I mean, the fact that we could afford to do play scenes that lasted _hours_ just went to prove how wrong Haley was.

Then again, I had profiled a _long time ago_ that Hotch and Haley weren’t exactly the… experimental types in bed. They both seemed like one and done kinds of people. But then Hotch found the goddamn black box, and now he could go for hours and hours, just watching me whiter and beg. Him and Haley definitely didn’t have that. So, of course she felt like he wasn’t around enough of the time. Not to diss her or anything (because she had always been nice to me), but Hotch’s life with her seemed… _boring_. He would go to work, come home to argue, eat dinner, hang out with Jack, then go to bed. Rinse and repeat. If she really did cheat, then there was no way in hell she was sleeping with Hotch. According to profiles, most cheating wives felt disgusted by their significant other, hence the reason for cheating. Haley was seeking release elsewhere, so she wasn’t giving any part of herself to Hotch. No wonder he would always jump me the first chance he got. He was so used to not getting anything at all, he was racing to make sure I was still his. It all suddenly made sense to me. Holy shit.

Haley reverted the topic back to my original point. “Is he okay now, though?”

I nodded. “He wasn’t taking any of the medications the doctors gave him, so I started babying him about it. I went to all of his doctor’s appointments, put him in physical therapy, set him up with a Bureau therapist, then oversaw his second round of psychological and physical evaluations to make sure he wasn’t lying.”

Haley smiled lightly. “You really do love him.”

I stared at her. “Of course.”

“No, I mean…” She chuckled somewhat. “There aren’t many people who would do that for… _anyone_. I don’t think I would’ve done it for him.” She licked her fingers as she finished cutting the cake. “He’s lucky to have you, Y/N. I say that sincerely. Jack and Aaron are both very lucky to have you.”

“Thank you, Haley,” I said just as sincerely. “You never— You don’t _have_ to be nice to me; but I Aaron and I are both extremely thankful that you are.”

“Like I said, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I ruined things with Aaron. There’s no point in making everyone’s life hell. Jack loves you; you treat him well. If you didn’t treat him like your own, I don’t think I’d be so kind. But you make them happy. Who am I to come between that?”

“You’re his mother—you have every right and opportunity to be horrible to me.”

“Well, maybe I’m not as much of a witch as you think I am.”

My eyes widened in shock and embarrassment. That wasn’t how I intended for this conversation to go, and that certainly wasn’t how I expected her to respond to what started as a _compliment_.

“Carl!” Haley called out to the parents in the other room. “Do you want to wrangle the kids for cake, please?!”

A man entered the kitchen cautiously. I suddenly realized that all of the parents must’ve been hiding around the corner, eavesdropping on mine and Haley’s conversation. The ex-wife and the girlfriend talking privately about their family? _Scandalous_. Of course, bored suburban parents like them were listening to see if the claws would come out. To be fair, they kind of did towards the end, and I had no doubts that if Haley wasn’t ready to hand out the cake slices to the kids, our conversation would’ve spiraled into an argument. But what good would that have done? Haley and I always got along for Jack and Hotch’s sake. They needed us to work together, to see eye to eye, in order for their lives to feel _normal_. Hotch needed stability in every aspect of his life. He needed his job, his home, his family, his relationship(s), and his sex life to all work as separate cogs in one working machine that was his life. Haley and I were his family. Haley and I were his relationships. If we started cat fighting all the time, his whole machine would fall apart. For that sake alone, Haley and I tried our best to get along.

* * *

Jack was on a sugar high after we left Paul’s birthday party. Considering I knew that he still had some homework to finish for the next day, I was less than excited about it. The prospect of having to wrangle a kid on cloud nine after he had been running around for hours, simultaneously chugging Coke and eating cake like it was his job, was absolutely horrifying. Hotch was the bad cop. I was the good cop. That was how things worked. I’d sneak Jack some extra chocolate under the table during dessert or make the ice cream deals; Hotch would make Jack do his homework, get him ready for school on time, and make sure he was in bed before nine. But now that Hotch was gone for who knew how long, I had to be the bad guy and make Jack do all of those things. Great.

Before I was even into the house, I heard Jack run straight for the back door. I rolled my eyes as I closed the door behind me and turned off the alarm. When the sound of one of Jack’s soccer balls bouncing in his toy room started to echo through the house, I warned him that he had to do his homework, or his dad would kill us both. Jack held the ball so I couldn’t hear him anymore, but I knew that he wasn’t heeding my warning, so I tracked him down to the toy room where he was putting on his cleats.

I leaned against the doorframe. “One hour,” I gave in with a small smile. Jack looked up at me as his face brightened. His shoes weren’t even tied yet, but he raced over to me and hugged my hips while thanking me a thousand times. I giggled as I hugged him back. “But then you _have_ to do your homework.”

“Deal,” Jack said. He let go of me so that he could finish tying his shoes.

When he was ready, I followed him out to the backyard. As he set up the mini goal, I sat at the patio table, pulled out some work, and started looking through what paperwork I had to do. Because Hotch left, I had nothing to do but work. Maybe it would be nice to finally actually get things done for once without being constantly distracted. Hotch had a tendency to jump me whenever he was bored. Working hours up in the home office were the worst. If he hadn’t gotten that call to leave for Texas, Hotch probably would’ve had me on my knees under his desk for him at some point.

Jack tried shooting the ball into the net, but it missed. As it smacked the fence a few feet behind the goal, Jack and I both cringed, then chuckled when we glanced at each other. He wasn’t very good, I’d be the first to admit. I mean, who was at that age, really? But he was proud of himself. He worked hard, he took it seriously, and he loved the sport. What more could I ask for? He was a perfect kid. I was just lucky that he liked me enough to hug me, and that he felt comfortable with having me sit outside with him while he practiced. Even Hotch didn’t get to watch him practice. Like I told Hotch that morning, I was the cool parent. And I wasn’t going to give up that title any time soon. Sucker.

“Y/N,” Jack called my name as he kicked the ball back to the middle of the backyard, “watch this.” I set my pen down on my paperwork to show that he had my full attention. When Jack was sure I was watching, he picked up the ball and started juggling it on his knees while counting out loud how many he got in a row. He only got to about nine before he dropped it. “Wait, I’ll try again.” While he was distracted with grabbing the ball again, I grabbed my phone and opened the camera. Just as he was about to start juggling it again, I pressed record. “One, two, three, four,” he counted carefully. His focus was trained on the ball, nothing else. I had never seen him so focused. Not even on homework. Not even on superhero homework, either. “Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—” And then he dropped it. “No!” he cried out, racing to catch the ball.

I laughed to myself as I ended the recording and started sending it over to Hotch.

 _To Aaron Hotchner:_ We both miss you.

 _From Aaron Hotchner:_ I thought he was supposed to be working on homework?

 _To Aaron Hotchner:_ He will. He just wanted to show you his cool, new trick.

 _From Aaron Hotchner:_ I miss you.

My heart melted in my chest as I read his text.

 _To Aaron Hotchner:_ I miss you, too. How did it go today?

 _From Aaron Hotchner:_ It’s a mess.

I smirked.

 _To Aaron Hotchner:_ It always is. I love you. Come home soon.

 _From Aaron Hotchner:_ I love you.

And then I put my phone away.

For the next hour, I tried balancing doing my work while watching Jack play soccer. He wanted to show me all of these cool tricks, as if I didn’t go to every one of his practices and games I was in town for. My time with him wasn’t ensured, though. Being with Jack felt like borrowed time, and I couldn’t forget that, even for a second. Work was constant, but our family was more important. Balancing our time was all Hotch and I had. We had learned all of the tricks, worked together to figure out how to make this all work, talked about how we were going to be a family. Watching Jack when we were busy was a sacrifice we had to make. I’d rather face the wrath of Strauss than not have these moments with Jack. I wasn’t going to prove Haley right. Hotch and I knew how to relax and spend time outside of work. We weren’t who she painted us to be.

Finally, when my alarm went off, I had to burst Jack’s bubble, telling him that it was time to go inside and work on his homework. He groaned. He knew the deal we made, and despite his half-hearted protests, I followed him back inside. As Jack went to take off his cleats, I sat at the dining room table to continue my work. A minute later, he joined me. He put his backpack on the table, pulled out his homework folder, grabbed a pencil, and started working in silence with me—almost like he was mimicking my behavior.

When Hotch and I were working at home, we normally did it upstairs in the office because Jack would either hide in his spot to work the case with his dad, or he’d play in his room. Either way, he wouldn’t see the horrible realities of what we were working on. I think that was why Jack was working so hard with me in the room. He wanted to prove that his junior superhero homework was just as important as ours.

“What is that?” Jack asked me from across the table.

I picked my head up and looked at him. “Oh. Well… It’s, um, it’s _my_ superhero homework.”

“Duh. What is it?”

I glanced quickly at the crime scene photos in front of me, the images of the women our most recent Unsub embalmed alive sitting on top of the stack. Jack couldn’t know about that. He knew better than to ask about our work. He was only four—there was no way in hell I was going to fess up to working on paperwork for a case where the Unsub kidnapped and embalmed women, then discarded them like they were nothing. So, I played it safe. I pulled the Hotch card, dodging Jack’s question by telling him to get back to his homework. I really fucking hated playing the bad guy.

A few hours later, after Jack left to go play with his toys in the living room, my phone started ringing. Hotch’s name was flashing across the screen. I sighed with relief and answered. I wished he would’ve called sooner. For some reason, I expected that he was going to call me when he landed, and when that didn’t come, I started counting the minutes until I would hear more from him than just our text messages earlier.

“I love you,” I blurted while answering.

Hotch chuckled lightly. “Hello to you, too.”

“Sorry… I just… I’ve been worrying.”

“I know. I’m sorry, baby. But I’m okay. I promised you that I would be okay. I’ve just been ridiculously busy here.”

I let out a quiet, shaky breath. He was okay. I was okay. Jack was okay. We were all okay. “Is everything alright with the case?”

“You’re going to hate me.”

“Aaron—”

“—I’m calling the rest of the team down—”

“—No.”

“I’m sorry, baby. I know you’ve been trying to hang out more with Jack one on one. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You said it was just a consultation,” I whined.

“Y/N…” he sighed. “Please. Don’t be a brat this one time.”

That caught me off guard. Mentioning the black box earlier was something I had entirely forgotten about because I put all of my effort and attention into work and Jack… But it seemed that even though Hotch was busy with this case, he remembered. It was torture to hear him say it. Torture because I couldn’t do anything about it but fly down to Dallas and pull him into bed with me. Fair enough, Agent Hotchner. Two can play that game.

“Yes, Sir.”

He groaned lightly. “I fucking love you.”

I smiled and bit my lip. “When’s the flight?”

“In an hour.”

I rolled my eyes, my seduction and arousal washing away as I tried to figure out what we were going to do. Jack and I hadn’t even eaten dinner yet. I was going to have to explain all of this while dropping him off with Haley, likely catching her off guard. After the conversation we had earlier, I didn’t want to prove her right, to give her another excuse to claim that Hotch and I weren’t around enough. I told her we knew how to take time off. We knew how to _balance_ our time. Dropping Jack off in a hurry before another random case… I didn’t want to have to face her alone.

“By the way, you know you could’ve warned me that Haley was going to be at the party today.”

“I didn’t— I would’ve—” he was stuttering through his shock and confusion. “I had no idea. Y/N, I swear, I had no clue.”

He sounded like he really didn’t know. Hotch hardly stuttered, but when he did, it was a tell that he was entirely caught off guard by something personal. Neither of us let work bother us, but if there was something personal involved, he would stutter. Like in New York. Nerves mixed with worry about me and Kate had caused him to stutter. It was a tell I was quickly catching onto. If Hotch had known about Haley going to help Susan at Paul’s birthday party, he probably would’ve told me. Especially since he was leaving. Sending me into that party with Haley there was like sending a lone soldier into battle. If he knew, he would’ve prepared me.

“I believe you,” I admitted quietly. “I’ll take Jack to Haley’s, and I’ll see you in a few hours.”

It sounded like I was wrapping up the call, but Hotch stopped me. “Hey,” he caught my attention. “I love you. So much.” My shoulders relaxed at his words. “And thank you, baby girl. For everything.”

“I love you, too. I’ll make sure the team reviews the case on the jet.”

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

“I love you. Bye.”

I hung up the call before we could drag it on unnecessarily. Jack was going to kill me. He really thought that I was going to stick around while his dad was gone, but now I was being called away, too, and he was going to be heartbroken. Hotch was right— I wanted to spend more one on one time with Jack. Getting to know him and raise him was exciting. Even in the short year that I knew Jack, I knew that we had a connection. Beyond our red dinosaur and my attendance at all of his soccer stuff, there was some kind of unspoken connection where we understood each other. That was why it was so easy for me to get away with spoiling him. That was why he took to me so fast. Hotch always insisted that he was impressed with how well Jack and I got along, and I never really thought much of it until recently when I suddenly realized that I wanted to be an important part of Jack’s life. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I’d been calling them my family for close to a year now, and now that I was certain I wanted to marry Hotch, I wanted to ensure that I was as close with Jack as possible. Haley told me that she respected me for treating Jack like my own. It wasn’t something I actively went out of my way to do—it just happened naturally. But treating Jack like my own included feeling guilty for having to leave him like this every time we were called away on another case randomly.

I let out a sigh before faking a smile and perking up. “Jack!” I heard him stop playing. “Dad called,” I explained as I pushed my chair back and walked to the living room, “I’m being called away on a superhero adventure.”

That was how we referred to cases sometimes in order to lighten the blow. It was easier to keep raising him with the notion that this was part of being some kind of awesome superhero rather than face the truth that we were just busy people who unfortunately had to put our work first. That was the deal, though. This job was everything to us. Working at the BAU allowed us to feel like we were really making a difference—that we were making the world a better place for Jack to grow up in. It just sucked that he was still too young to understand all of that. He grasped the idea that we were “superheroes racing off to save the day!”, but he didn’t understand that Hotch and I loved our job as much as we loved him. It killed us to be away from him, but it also killed us to think about not working. That was why our suspensions were miserable, and why Hotch didn’t stay out of the field for very long after New York and Cincinnati.

“I’m sorry, little man.”

Still holding his neon green Hot Wheels car, Jack jumped to his feet and ran over to me. I picked him up. “Where are you going?”

“Texas.”

“Like, with cowboys?!” he asked excitedly.

I smiled and nodded. “Like, with cowboys, yeah.” I tapped his nose with my index finger. “I have to drive you to your mom’s house. Do you wanna go grab your stuff for me, please?”

He nodded. As I was about to set him down, he stopped me with, “Will you take this with you?” He handed the toy car to me. “I want you to have Red and Dad can have the car. You can give it to him when you see him.”

I held onto the car as tight as I could. “I’ll protect it with my life.” I finally put him back down on his feet.

* * *

After dropping Jack off at Haley’s with my eyes glued to the ground and my arms already missing him, I made my way to the jet. I kept Jack’s green toy with me, just like I promised. I kept it in my suit jacket pocket for safe keeping. For some reason, having a part of him with me only made me miss him more. Maybe it was wrong of me to give Hotch our red dinosaur for his trip. Maybe it did more harm than good. Because as I sat on the jet with the rest of the team, and they started reviewing the case, all I could do was flip the toy car over again and again in my fingers, thinking about how Jack liked to roll it over my shoulder when I would hold him. He’d make the funniest sounds, too. Every car he had made a different noise. This one somehow sounded like a strong race car with fire coming out of its engines for extra speed. He was so silly like that. But that was what made him special. That was why he was my little man.

But my train of thought was cut short when Morgan addressed me randomly. “Did Hotch call you about any of this?”

I shrugged. “I knew he was heading down there to consult on a case, and then the next thing I knew, we were being called down, too. I don’t know the details yet.” I opened the case file to start skimming all of the information that had been sent to Garcia, who printed it out and had it waiting for us on the jet. She needed a raise. “Two men dead, each in a hotel after withdrawing $10,000 from their bank accounts in the afternoon. If that doesn’t scream high end prostitute, I don’t know what does.”

“Well, the Viagra found next to the recent victim is a pretty good indicator, too,” Emily added.

I nodded. The toxicology report stated that none of the victims had yet ingested the Viagra, but they had been poisoned with rodenticides— a pesticide created to kill rodents. Enough of that would kill a human. And it did. The M.E. added that the cause of death came from the poisoning, probably hidden in the champagne that was found in each of the hotel rooms where the men were found. So, she was a prostitute targeting affluent, famous men willing to pay outrageous sums just for a little action, which would ultimately lead to their deaths. The interesting part, however, was that she wasn’t taking any trophies. In the past, when we worked with female Unsubs, we recognized that they had a tendency to take trophies off of their victims. But not here. At least nothing obvious outside of the money they were paying her. Then again, maybe she saw that as a trophy in itself. By taking their lives and their wealth, she was collecting parts of them that meant something.

At the crime scenes, there were no fingerprints found, no traces of the victims’ semen, and no traces of her arousal. There was no way to trace her. The only forensic evidence was the body, the empty glass of champagne the victim drank out of, and the bottle of champagne. The glass that she drank out of was nowhere to be found, and traces of the rat poison were only found in the victim’s glass, not the bottle. So, she was methodical and organized. She knew what she was doing and how to do it. Even with her first victim, she didn’t make any mistakes. She had been planning this for a while.

“Hotch mentioned that he was called down by the Attorney General because of his prior experience as a prosecutor,” I said. “Do we know why?”

“Ah, yes, I can answer that.” JJ sifted through some of the pages in her file. “The lawyers representing these men and their companies have already started closing rank. They’re refusing to cooperate with the investigation, and tonight, during the six o’clock news, they released similar official statements stating that the victims died peacefully in their homes.”

I chortled. “Great. Can we get them on interfering with a federal investigation?”

“Maybe. I could see.”

“I don’t think that’s the right play here,” Rossi said. “I think we need to play it smart with the lawyers, see if we can get any information out of them.”

I sighed, giving in. My mind was racing, and I was too exhausted to put up a fight. I didn’t understand how Hotch could do this. Every day, he got up at outrageous hours, went to work, led the team, stayed up all night to work on reports, then he would come home to just be with his family. How? I was worn out after keeping up with Jack and Haley all day, and then having to lead the team like I promised I would… Hotch didn’t get enough credit. He didn’t get enough time off—and I didn’t mean vacations, like Haley said. I meant that he hardly got a second to himself. I argued that Hotch was so good at balancing his time between work and his family, but what I failed to recognize earlier was that none of that time included taking a moment to relax with his thoughts— to spend a moment on his own. I felt bad about it suddenly. I knew that we played over the phone, and there was somewhat of a silent agreement that something would happen when I would arrive in Dallas with the team; but now I was wondering if I could just… lighten the load for him. Offer to take up his work for a bit so that he could shower, get a drink, maybe even go to sleep. Yeah, I could do that. I was tired, but I just wanted to do this for Hotch. I wasn’t sure why the urge to do so was washing over me, I just knew that I _had_ to make the effort.

* * *

In the morning, after we had all slept a bit after landing in Dallas, we all met up in the lobby of the hotel to discuss the case a bit more with Hotch, then receive our assignments. It was just another crash course on what we were working with. Hotch explained that he had been called down by the Attorney General to consult on the case because of how all of the lawyers were hounding on this and wanted to make it all go away. When Hotch saw the evidence at the recent crime scene, he immediately knew that we were dealing with a serial killer. The Attorney General didn’t care how we solved this case, as long as it was done quiet and fast. The lawyers were practically killing him.

JJ looked up from her phone. “Well, the lawyers might not want to speak with us, but Mrs. Ashford does. She called me this morning. Apparently, she’s not too happy with how her husband died and how the lawyers are covering it up.”

Mrs. Ashford, being the most recent victim’s wife. Questioning witnesses, survivors, and family members was Rossi and Emily’s thing, and—

“Y/N, Morgan, and Emily, go talk with Mrs. Ashford,” Hotch ordered.

“All three of us?” Morgan questioned.

“Yes. All three of you.”

Morgan rolled his eyes in my direction as he turned on his heels to start making his way for the door. Emily and I took a moment to stare at each other before following. Hey, I wasn’t going to argue with getting to spend more time with Morgan and Emily, alright. They were my closest friends on the team—though I loved everyone dearly, don’t get me wrong; I just spent more time with them over anyone else. Hanging out with them was fun. Working with them was always… well… interesting. The three of us bonded so well, which was why Hotch was never afraid of teaming the three of us up for tasks like visiting crime scenes or clearing buildings, etc. But going to question one woman? Morgan was right, it was odd to send all three of us. Then again, maybe Hotch was just on edge because of the nature of this case. Maybe he didn’t want Emily and I to be… I don’t know… That was a ridiculous notion. Emily and I knew how to take care of ourselves. We didn’t need a man around to babysit us. Therefore, I hoped that Hotch pairing the three of us up was just because he had nothing else for us to do.

When we arrived at the Ashford’s residence, we were immediately greeted by Mrs. Ashford, already dressed in head to toe black fashion with an expensive set of pearl earrings to make the necklace hanging around her neck. She certainly looked distraught at a first glance, but with how her husband was found, I could see that there was anger blazing through her eyes. She wanted to help us. She wanted to put the woman responsible away for a long time. I didn’t blame her at all. Honestly, it was a miracle that she wanted to talk to us when no one else would. Hopefully, it meant that we could get something good out of her.

She invited us inside and led us to the living room. In the car, Morgan offered up the idea that Emily and I should lead the interview for the “female touch”, to which Emily and I rolled our eyes. Now that we were there, though, it seemed that the “female touch” he was referring to was exactly what was going to give us a connection to her.

“We know this is hard, Mrs. Ashford, but is there anything you can tell us about what he…” Emily trailed off.

“Liked in bed?” Mrs. Ashford questioned with a scoff. When the three of us nodded, she continued, “I’ll sum it up with one word: younger.”

“How _much_ younger?” Morgan asked.

“Twenty-four or twenty-five. Anything legal. I met him when I was twenty.”

“So, your age difference was part of the attraction,” I said. I couldn’t judge her for that. Look at me and Hotch.

“Are you kidding? It was the whole relationship.”

Well, that wasn’t like me and Hotch at all. Everyone had their own likes, I supposed. “Was there anything else that could have possibly attracted your husband to this girl? Besides the age, we’re trying to find a connection.”

“Being with a younger woman gives men like my husband an ego boost, Agent Greenaway. Sex is the only things that matters. They like to… _abuse_ the power and dominance it gives them. It makes them feel like they’re in control of every aspect of their lives. So, no. There wouldn’t be anything else.”

Emily’s phone started ringing. She apologized and excused herself so that she could answer it while fishing for it in her pocket. When she was gone, Morgan and I turned to Mrs. Ashford again. I asked myself if Hotch was like her husband. Did dating me… Well, did it give him an ego boost? Did he enjoy knowing that he could date someone younger? He didn’t abuse the power that came from our Dominant/submissive relationship. He didn’t abuse me physically or mentally. But did he still think to himself that he had… I don’t know… _won_ at life by dating me? Did parading me around in front of our friends, our coworkers, and Haley give him a rush? It made me uncomfortable that I was suddenly questioning all of that.

“I’m sorry,” Emily apologized, coming back into the room in a hurry. “Our boss is calling us back to meet with him.”

Morgan and I stood. The timing was somewhat inconvenient, but there really wasn’t much more we were going to get from her, though she was trying to be helpful. Knowing a bit more about the victimology, of course, helped our investigation, but she wasn’t a witness, and she didn’t seem to have any personal connection to the Unsub—at least none that we could see yet. If the investigation progressed and we were concerned that this would have more to do with the Ashfords, then we would return. Until then, we were finished.

“Thank you for meeting with us, Mrs. Ashford. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in contact.”

“By all means,” she said, smiling while standing. “Stop by or call— whatever you need. Just find the woman who did this to my husband.” She shook my hand.

I smiled lightly at her, though my mind was still racing with the consideration of whether or not Hotch and I were anything like her and her husband. I mean, he wasn’t a sugar daddy, and he wasn’t taking advantage of the fact that I was younger. Right? She really did a number on me, even though she didn’t realize. I just needed to take a breather. So, when Morgan, Emily, and I left the Ashford’s residence, I ran onto the lawn and sucked in a deep breath. JJ and Mrs. Ashford were getting under my skin. Hotch and I loved each other— age didn’t matter. Sex was a big part of our relationship, obviously, but it was still loving and passionate. Men like Mr. Ashford used sex to abuse women and escape their problems; men like Hotch understood that he might’ve had the upper hand in our dynamic, but I was in charge of the rules. He would never go too far with me. That was the difference. That was why I didn’t need to worry about our relationship. People’s opinions didn’t matter as long as we loved each other. Like I said, fresh air always cleared my head.

Back at the precinct, Morgan and I got out of the car, trading places with Emily and Reid who were assigned to go talk to a madame in town. Supposedly Hotch met with a corporate lawyer named Ellen Daniels while we were gone. The call Emily received was about a lead Ms. Daniels gave to him about how to get into the industry, how it works, and how we could find our Unsub who was hiding in plain sight. It sounded viable.

Inside, when Morgan and I met with the team to catch up on everything we knew now, which… wasn’t much. We had no connections between victims yet—besides their power and money—and there was no clear M.O. The fact that we didn’t have much left our conversation _dry_. At some point, Rossi offered coffee for those who wanted, so Morgan left with him. It was just me, Hotch, and JJ now, sitting in silence. I hadn’t told Hotch. It had been five months since New York. More specifically, it had been five months since JJ and I had a falling out. Everyone could tell that there was something wrong, and I had even tried to persevere through it by talking with her one afternoon, but it seemed that she was still adamant she was right. I didn’t tell Hotch the truth, though. I didn’t need him worrying about personal drama when we all needed to be concerned about the cases.

The tension in the room was so thick Hotch could cut it with a knife, if he wanted. I wished he would’ve. At some point, JJ and I were going to have to apologize to one another. Maybe. She was already six months pregnant, which meant that her time in the field would have to take a hiatus sooner or later in order to take care of the baby, and by then, what would our status be? Maybe the purity of having a new baby would allow us to grow up and move past all of this. Maybe we’d suddenly come to our senses and apologize to each other. Maybe we’d cry over how stupid we had been. I just wasn’t sure. Until then, however, we still weren’t okay.

Then there was a knock on the window. We all glanced over to see Rossi standing there, no coffee in hand, but a look on his face that said we had another crime scene to go to. I sighed. In and out of the precinct faster than I could say: “Sorry, JJ.”

The crime scene this time was at a prestigious company called Webster Industries. The body was found in one of the elevators by a guard. “The victim’s name was Joseph Fielding,” Rossi told us. “He was the CFO here.”

“She staged him this time…” I said, furrowing my brows as I stepped into the elevator this time.

Her M.O. and ritual hadn’t been clear yet because she didn’t have one, but this changed everything. She was taking her time to make a point to _us_ because she knew we were tracking her down. Earlier, Reid said that female Unsubs didn’t have a signature—which I fought him on—but he was right about our current Unsub until this victim. She didn’t do anything special or unique to her case. But now she was crossing lipstick stripes over the eyelids. She wanted our attention. Before, she had it and she didn’t know it, but this victim told us that she was watching the case closely, and she was practically daring us to catch her now.

The other two victims had been clothed when they died. We deduced that she was killing her victims before anything could happen, but this time around it seemed like she waited up until the very last second to do it. She was getting bored. Her old ritual was beginning to feel repetitive, so she needed to find a new way to get off on the death. By stripping him and binding him to the chair—likely consensually—she had the upper hand in the situation. She could do whatever she wanted to him, but she chose to kill him over all else. No sexual assault. So, this wasn’t to prove a point about any kind of assault in her past, and it wasn’t to prove a point about their own sexuality. This was something entirely different. There was a reason she was demeaning her victims, and there was a reason for this escalation. The question was, what was the trigger?

“I’m allowed back!” a man exclaimed. I peeked my head out of the elevator to see a short, stout, bald, angry man pushing past one of the uniform cops just to get to the crime scene. I stepped out. “Which one of yous is Aaron Hotchner?” His accent was ridiculously thick. It was almost hard to understand him. “Hotchner. Aaron Hotchner.”

“I’m Hotchner.”

“Larry Bartlett,” he introduced himself while holding out a hand. “I represent—” he glanced into the elevator before I could step in his line of sight. “ _Represented_ Mr. Fielding; but I still represent Webster Industries, even with his… _unfortunate_ passin’.”

“This is a closed crime scene, Mr. Bartlett. You can’t be here.”

“Yes, well, you see, I spoke to Ellen Daniels. She says you’re a very understandin’ and flexible man.”

Hotch glared at him. “I’m not.” He gestured to the uniforms, “Escort this man out, please.”

“No, wait— Please. The press is outside and I’m gonna have to explain all of this, which I’d rather not do, considerin’ the circumstances. Now, is there any way y’all can handle this discreetly?”

Morgan scoffed. “We’re not going to lie for you.”

“You don’ have to _lie_ ; just don’ comment.”

The four of us stood around, considering. Then, after another silent moment, Hotch spoke up, “Excuse us.” We followed him a few steps to the side and huddled close so that Mr. Bartlett couldn’t hear us. “Is there any reason to go public with this?” Hotch asked quietly. We all shook our heads. Telling the media about this would just cause the exact kind of frenzy she wanted. She was desperate for the attention, clearly. We couldn’t play into her hand. “He technically doesn’t need to know that, though, right?” We all carefully nodded an agreement. “We could use that as leverage.” We shrugged. “Okay.” Hotch stepped past us and reapproached the lawyer. “We need all of his information. Bank records, emails, tax records, mortgages, loans, everything.”

He stared at us for a moment while considering his options. He came to us hoping to get a deal, and this was the deal we could offer him. In exchange for our “discretion”, he had to give everything he had on his clients in order to help our investigation. None of it was exactly ideal for him. Regardless, he gave in, knowing that the discretion was worth it.

So, when we got back to the precinct to meet up with Emily, Reid, and JJ, it was no surprise that everything we requested was already there. Garcia, in all of her glory, made sure that every little bit of it was there. Meanwhile, JJ was working on printing it all out so that we had physical copies to work with. I sat down with Spencer, Rossi, Morgan, Emily, and Hotch to start going through everything.

“Eighteen cars, six houses, and three boats. Is there anything this guy didn’t like to spend his money on?” Spencer joked.

“Yeah,” I answered plainly. “His ex-wives. He was married four times—sounds familiar, Rossi—”

“I was only married _three_ times!” he defended.

“Focus,” Hotch growled quietly at us.

“All three of the victims were holding out on their wives,” I continued after glaring at Hotch. “They spent their money freely, but they weren’t paying child support—and if they were, it was the bear minimum—and they weren’t in contact with their ex-wives or children. They had practically cut all ties with their families.”

“So, why would a prominent businessman, who can afford to pay child support, refuse not to?”

“His ego.” I stood from my seat to reach for the phone and dial Garcia’s number. “When we met with Mrs. Ashford, she told us that all of this was about ego. They only care about themselves and the young women they’re fucking. Paying child support, for them, is lame. It’s low. So, by ignoring it, they boost their ego even more. It’s like a big middle finger to the women they married but ended up leaving because they ‘got too old’ for their taste.”

“So, they’re narcissistic, self-absorbed, a pathological avoidance of paternal responsibilities.”

“That could be the trigger,” Rossi offered up. “If she came from nothing—no money, a broken home, even an absent father—she might see her victims as surrogates of the father that abandoned her and made her life crumble. She probably blames him for becoming a sex worker. Because of him and his irresponsibility, she had no choice but to become a prostitute. So, now, she’s taking it out on these men.”

“This all nice and whatnot, but who do we share this profile with?” JJ asked.

Emily nodded. “She’s right. The public wouldn’t know how to keep an eye out for a girl that isn’t even in their realm, the cops are probably just as blind as the public and the victims are… We have no one of use to share this profile with. No one who can help us.”

“We can always share the profile with the public, just in case,” I said.

“I could set up a press conference,” JJ offered, “but I don’t know how much good it’s going to do.”

“What if we give the profile to the corporate lawyers?” Hotch inquired.

The room fell quiet.

That was how we ended up in a boardroom filled with every corporate lawyer in Dallas and their teams. The room was packed full. We were standing at the front of the room, our backs to the evidence we were willing to show them in order to help _them_ narrow down who we were looking for. Hotch, as always, started us off. He introduced every member of the team, then discussed how important it was that the profile we were going to present did _not_ leave that boardroom. It was for the lawyers to consider at their own discretion, but it was not to be discussed with anyone else. To do so would result in their arrest for interfering with a federal investigation. As lawyers, they all knew that Hotch’s threat was real. They also knew that if they let this leak, it would only do them more harm than good.

We explained that we were looking for a white woman between the ages of twenty-five to thirty. Based on the information Mrs. Ashford gave us about her husband’s interests in women, and the information Reid and Prentiss got from the Madame, we were able to deduce that her age range didn’t exceed thirty because most men who saw an appeal in younger women viewed thirty as “old”. It was a cut off age for them. They left most of their ex-wives when they hit an age anywhere between thirty to forty. Therefore, there was no chance our Unsub was older than thirty. The lawyers had access to their clients’ financial information—which was how Hotch was called down to consult on this case in the first place. Because of that, they were most likely to know who was spending the $10-$15,000 per session on this woman. If that much money was going missing on a regular basis, they should tell us immediately. That was the deal. This was all to protect them, their clients, and the companies they worked for. Since they were selfish bastards, it was important to remind them that if their bosses died, they could lose their jobs or practices.

“Even though she’s a call girl, she doesn’t look like one,” JJ added after me.

I froze for a second before continuing. JJ was right. We knew that she blended in well with crowds, and that she looked elegant enough to catch these men’s eyes. They wouldn’t pay for just any sex worker. They were going to pay for someone super model beautiful that could get away with being prudent. There was even a possibility that the lawyers in the room with us had actually seen her before, but dismissed her because she looked business professional. The men who pay for her, never dismissed her, though. They worshipped her. Not only would they pay with money, they would also pay with luxury items in order to praise her. Cars, jewelry, fashion, medical expenses—a _house_ , even. There was no limit to these men’s fascination and inclination to shower this woman with gifts.

Emily nodded and continued. “Based on her behavior, we can assume that she did not grow up with a father figure. She blames him for her broken home childhood, and she’s not turning that rage onto her victims—other men who walked out on their families.”

“That’s not all she’s doing,” Hotch said. “She’s figuring out who to target because during their _‘pillow talk’_ , they’re spewing every detail of their lives to her. That’s part of the seduction and release they get from seeing her. All that dirty laundry you’ve been trying so hard to keep covered up is no longer privileged information. She knows it and she’s using it against her victims.”

“As long as she’s out there, it’s not just your victims that are in danger; your firms are, too,” Rossi said.

I agreed. “It’s imperative you share any information you may have with us.”

“Um… Excuse me,” someone said from the back of the room. The crowd parted to show a petite brunette woman with a notepad in hand and a Bluetooth headset in her ear. She looked shy to be stepping forward. “I work for Webster Industries. The other month, I happened across a discrepancy in some bills and files. Apparently, Mr. Fielding has a secret penthouse downtown. I asked him about it, and he told me to forget about it. Are those the kinds of things you’re looking for?”

My jaw fell. Yeah, that was _exactly_ what we were looking for. We knew that these women were paid with objects—like houses, just as we said—and if Mr. Fielding and our Unsub were “together” for long enough, it was entirely possible that he was paying for her to live in that penthouse. Regardless of the truth, we needed to check it out.

“Do you have an address?” JJ inquired.

“Yeah.”

JJ started walking out of the boardroom, gesturing for the woman to join her. In the meantime, we had to quickly wrap up with the lawyers. Hotch rushed to finish the profile. He was racing through his words, never taking a break for answers or interruptions. The rest of us started collecting our things to head out. I left to grab our vests, throwing them at Emily, Rossi, Morgan, Reid, then Hotch as they made their way out. Our phones buzzed with a text from JJ giving us the address of the penthouse that was mentioned. This could potentially have been the lead we needed to close the case. Looking at this penthouse, if it really did belong to our Unsub, could guide us towards more answers.

When we arrived at the penthouse, we gathered in front of the door, our weapons out, waiting for Hotch’s signal. Morgan, however, wasn’t waiting. He pushed forward then kicked the door in without warning. Knowing that there wasn’t much time, we all flooded into the room, taking different rooms to clear. There was the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the walk-in closet, and the two bathrooms. Everywhere was clear. So, naturally, everyone took a room to start tearing apart for answers.

Morgan and I took the walk-in closet. It was so big that there was even a large white vanity against one wall. It had three mirrors and huge bulbs surrounding them to give her the best lighting. The room itself had shelves lined with all kinds of shoes: sneakers, heels, sandals, flats, more fucking heels. There were drawers filled with underwear—lots and lots of underwear and lingerie—socks, sex toys, and jewelry. I stopped when I came across a locked box hidden in her underwear drawer. I picked it up and shimmied the lock open with a bobby pin from her vanity. When it opened, I gasped slightly, then smirked at what I found, feeling like it was a slight win over Morgan who still hadn’t found anything.

“I struck gold. Literally,” I snickered. Morgan turned with a flogger in hand. I chuckled at him, “Couldn’t resist?” He rolled his eyes and put it away. “Look at this.” I handed him the small gold ring that was hidden inside the locked box. “It’s a purity ring.”

“This wouldn’t fit any adult.”

I nodded. “Exactly. Whoever gave that to her meant something. And considering the size of it, I’m going to guess it was her parents that gave it to her when she was younger.”

“Probably her father, trying to make her promise to be daddy’s girl forever.”

“Ding, ding, ding. Derek Morgan wins big.”

He tsked his tongue as he opened up a small closer. “Lookie here…” He pulled out a black and red latex nurse play dress for roleplaying during sex. It was small, and it looked like it would be uncomfortably tight. “I wonder…” He held it up in the air and squinted.

I quickly realized that he was trying to decide if it would look good on me—regardless of if it would fit or not. “You are absolutely _disgusting_.”

I smacked Morgan’s hand away, making him drop the latex dress onto the ground. As he bent down to pick it up, the phone in the living room started ringing. We looked at each other before rushing to see what the plan was going to be. Reid was already offering up that Emily or I should be the one to answer in case it was a customer, but then Rossi was considering if it could be our Unsub calling back to hear her voice messages to see if she had any missed calls from clients. While the phone kept ringing, Morgan called Garcia and asked her to trace it.

“Prentiss, take the lead,” Hotch told her.

She nodded and reached down, her hand hovering on the phone, waiting for Garcia’s signal. But we missed it. The call went to voicemail, and now the only chance we had was hoping that whoever it was would stay on long enough for Emily to pick it up midway through them leaving a voice message. What we heard next, though, caught us all off guard. My nerves jumped when I heard it. Hotch eyed me cautiously.

“Aaron, I know you’re up there. Pick up. Aaron Hotchner!”

I shook my head at him. She _wanted_ him to pick up, to play her game, to give her the chance to toy with someone. We had spent the case focusing on not giving her what she wanted. We knew that if we danced around her agenda, she would end up making a mistake—like calling her penthouse while Garcia was setting up a trap and trace. Maybe if Emily or I picked it up, we could play with _her_ to continue keeping with our plan. But Hotch wasn’t paying attention. His eyes were now glued to the phone. I could tell that he was considering picking up, but I didn’t want him to. Ever since meeting with Mrs. Ashford, I didn’t want Hotch to do anything with this case. Now I understood why he was so possessive over me. It irked me to think that the Unsub knew his name, but it was even worse to consider that the fluctuations in her voice, the way she seemed so happy and seductive, I could tell that she… Well… She was fascinated with him. Why else would she know his name and then ask for him specifically? Did she know who I was? Was that why she wanted to talk to him? Because she saw in Hotch what Mrs. Ashford referred to with her husband? Did she see a couple with an age gap and immediately assume that Hotch was like all the other men she was killing? I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear it—and I especially didn’t want the team to hear it. Hotch, however, didn’t seem to care.

Hotch stepped forward and answered the call. “Hello?”

Emily reached down to put the call on speaker so that we could listen in.

As Hotch continued to talk, he walked across the room, his back to us. “I’m at a disadvantage. You seem to know my name, but I don’t seem to know yours. Can we start there?”

“I thought I could trust you, Aaron. I looked you up online, watched videos of you on the news— I watched your seminar on school shootings. I thought you were so upstanding. Is that crazy?”

“Not at all. It’s flattering to be noticed by a woman like you. But it sounds like I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I? Just like all of the other men in your life who abandoned their families— who deserve to be punished.”

She chuckled. “I noticed that you were wearing a wedding ring in a video posted on YouTube a few years ago, but you weren’t wearing one five months ago. Did you walk on your family, too, Agent Hotchner?”

“No. My wife left me.”

“Did she take your son?”

“Yes.”

Hotch turned on his heels to exchange a glance with me. My eyes were soft as pity filled my chest. Everyone— even the Unsubs— seemed to know that Hotch lost everything when Haley left him. And despite how much it hurt to relive and admit that, Hotch had to play her game in order to keep her on the phone long enough. So, he told her that Haley took Jack, and that he hardly gets to see him because of it. She almost sounded sympathetic as she told him that she believed him when he said he wished that he could see Jack more. Everyone felt that way. Hotch was so good with Jack. He deserved to spend as much time with his son as possible, but it was hard with work. It was nothing we could control, and that was the sad truth that we hated admitting to each other. The good news was that since their divorce Haley had really loosened up with custody, and we could see Jack whenever we were in town. Most divorced parents didn’t get the same courtesy. I think the Unsub understood that because her demeanor changed briefly while talking about Jack, then reverted right back to how stern, broken, and condescending it was prior.

“I see myself in you, Aaron,” she told him. “You’re just another whore.”

“How am I a whore?”

I bit back a chuckle. I turned away from the group when they looked over at me, and I hid my face in my elbow like I was sneezing. When the smile faded from my face, I stood tall again and looked around to make sure no one was suspicious of my fake sneeze.

“You come when called. You do their bidding. In the hotels, you take the side elevator to avoid crowds. You wouldn’t even look at me in the elevator. How could you not look at me then, but you attempt to flatter me now, Aaron?” She paused before her breath hitched with a realization. “Who is she?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who did you leave your wife for?”

“I told you that I didn’t leave my wife. She left me—”

“Who is she, Aaron!”

“Does it matter?”

She sighed heavily. I could tell that she was biting back a lifetime worth of bitterness and rage that she wanted to unleash on all men of power—including Hotch, but questioning him about me wasn’t going to prove anything to her. Hotch loved Haley, and he supported her and Jack as much as he could both financially and otherwise. She was going after men who had wronged the women in their lives. Hotch wasn’t them. He was a good man who loved his family. Screaming about me, trying to pry for answers that Hotch would never willingly give in order to protect me, wasn’t going to solve her problems. It wasn’t going to make the point she was trying to prove. Men in power sucked. Men with money sucked. Men sucked. Men needed to be taught a lesson. Hotch wasn’t one of those men, however, and she recognized that the same way I did.

“Truth be told, I’m not interested in talking about my family; and I know that you’re not interested in it either. What I am interested in is finding you, in hearing your side of the story, in telling the world what you’ve done so that they can applaud you.”

“You’re a liar, Aaron. You’re a liar like the rest of them! You just want me to turn myself in so that you can make this go away! You want me to disappear—just like they do!”

“No,” Hotch insisted, shaking his head, “I won’t let you disappear. I promise. My word is my bond.”

Her breath sputtered slightly. She was crying. “If we had met under different circumstances… I could have believed that…” And then the sound of a gunshot rang through the call before she hung up on us.

“ _Garcia!_ ” Morgan hissed.

“I got it! 1818 Corinth Avenue!”

Hotch, Emily, Morgan, and I raced out of the penthouse. Rossi and Reid were going to stay to keep looking around, maybe call in a crime scene unit if needed to find fingerprints. Not that it would help. We were racing against a clock now. By the time any positive I.D. could come back from the lab, it would be too late.

The news started swarming the car just as we pulled up the crime scene. Hotch couldn’t drive through the crowd, so we had to get out and try to push our way forward. As we jumped out, a microphone was shoved in my face. I pushed it away. Immediately, there was another microphone in my way to replace the first one, making it impossible for me to get around. The cameras were in my face, flashes of photos were blinding me, and all I could do was keep an arm out to make a path for myself.

I heard the rest of the team having a rough time getting through, too. Morgan and Emily were yelling at everyone to move, meanwhile I had resulted to practically body checking people. Finally, as I stumbled into the parking garage, I let out a sigh. The uniforms were holding the news back. Sort of. Once I made it past them, I could clear my eyes and pop my ears. This was why JJ was responsible for the press, not me. I hated it. They all wanted answers—I understood that they were just trying to do their jobs, the same way we were trying to do ours—but we didn’t have any answers. We had only just gotten to the crime scene. What were we supposed to tell them?

There was only one car in the parking garage. Either the uniforms had the place cleared out so that we could look at the crime scene, or it was empty when it happened. Considering no one saw or heard anything, I was going to bet on the latter, otherwise I was going to be pissed if the uniforms fucked up our crime scene.

In the car, there was a male victim in the driver’s seat. His hands were duct tape to the steering wheel, his mouth was duct tape shut, his cheeks were stained with tears, and his blood and brains were splattered everywhere. We heard a gunshot over the phone before she hung up on us. This was certainly a change in M.O. Her thing was poisoning her victims so that she could watch them slowly die, but she chose to let us know that she was spiraling, rushing, and sending us a signal. She did this because of Hotch.

“I don’t understand,” I said, leaning up from ducking into the car to look at the body, “this isn’t as personal as her other killings. She’s been watching her victims die in order to gain either emotional or sexual release—or even both. But this. Shooting someone with a gun? That’s a distance killing compared to her previous M.O. I just don’t understand why she would switch.”

“To make a point to Hotch,” Morgan suggested.

I shook my head. “It’s more than that.” I grabbed my phone and called Garcia. “Hey. Can you give me a background on Trent Rabner?”

“Sure thing, buttercup. Anything specific?” she asked.

“Just something to suggest that he matches our victimology. Did he walk out on his family? Financially abandon a wife? Something like that.”

“Mmm…” She was searching. “No… He was only married once, but she died recently, and they never had any kids.”

“What about foundations that he abandoned?”

“None.”

I looked at Morgan. “So why the hell did she kill him?”

“Maybe she’s spiraled so far that it doesn’t matter _why_ she kills anyone anymore. It’s just about killing wealthy men.”

“But we didn’t profile that she could spiral out of her M.O.”

“It happens.”

“So, if she’s devolving, what’s her endgame going to be?”

Morgan considered for a moment. “Wait. We’ve been saying this whole time that she was probably raised in a broken home with no money, right. But after finding that purity ring in her penthouse—a ring which looked expensive as hell— maybe this is all really about the rich family she grew up in but was then tossed to the side like nothing. She’s getting back at her own father vicariously, but now that she’s approaching her endgame, she’s going to head directly for him.”

“We need to start looking at the daughters of the CEOs in town.” I turned to see Hotch and Emily talking with the lead detective. “Hotch!” He looked up at the mention of his name, then came over to us once he excused himself from his conversation with Emily and the detective. “That lawyer who put you in touch with the madame, do you think we could bring her in?”

He furrowed his brows. “What for?”

“We think she might know who the Unsub is.”

“How do you figure that?”

“We think that one of the daughters of the CEOs in town is doing this to get back at her father. If she’s devolving, she’s going to go after him next. Ms. Daniels might be able to tell us which one of the daughters we should be looking at.”

Hotch grabbed his phone. “I’ll have Rossi and Reid bring her down to the precinct.” He stepped away to call Rossi.

Morgan faced me. “You know she’ll play hardball, right?”

I smirked. “So will Hotch.”

* * *

When we arrived at the precinct, Emily and Morgan raced inside unexplainably, while Hotch and I took a moment in the parking lot to see if Reid and Rossi were back yet. We spotted their car just a few spots over, which meant that they likely had Ellen Daniels with them. Good. The sooner we got information out of her, the sooner we could close the case. So, I started walking up the sidewalk.

Suddenly, Hotch caught my bicep. As I tried to continue past him, he squeezed and started pulling me to the side. I groaned while following him. We came to a sudden stop, Hotch releasing my arm long enough for me to start pulling off my vest. The Velcro on my chest barely started ripping apart before Hotch roughly pinched my face, making me look straight at him, not even worrying about anyone who could possibly see us.

“Did you have to laugh earlier?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “I just thought it was funny.”

“Why?”

“Because usually you’re the one calling me a whore. It’s just ironic that someone could finally say it to you.” I grinned. “Does it bother you? I thought you liked what happened in the car before the Super Bowl party.” That happened a year ago, but it was still something that I teased him with from time to time. And it was definitely something neither of us had forgotten about.

“Careful…”

“Careful what? Careful, whore? You’d just be talking about yourself, then, Aaron,” I giggled.

“You’re never going to let this go, are you?”

I patted his chest. “We’ll see. Whore.” I couldn’t help but laugh again.

“Come here,” he demanded, reaching for my hips.

I yelped and started running into the precinct to seek out the safety of witnesses. The team turned to see me running in, my vest barely clinging to me, my face flustered, and Hotch nonchalantly following on my heels. I smiled casually as I slowed down. I knew that my little joke was going to come back to bite me in the ass eventually, but it would have to wait until the case was over, which bought me a little time to make him forget about it. I’d have to come up with something ridiculous to earn praise over punishment. While it was fun to toy with Hotch, this was the hard part— trying not to think about it while it really _was_ all I could think about.

“Dave,” Hotch said quietly, pulling off his vest.

Rossi stood from his seat, grabbing Hotch’s jacket off the back of one of the chairs for him. As I pulled my vest off, too, I watched them head into the interrogation room together to talk to Ms. Daniels. Hotch didn’t look at all bothered like I was. That was just one more thing I hated about him. He could play with me all day and not blink an eye, but if he so much as touched my hand, I was a goner. It really wasn’t fair.

A few minutes later, as we were all standing by, Rossi and Hotch came out of the interrogation room. We all looked to them for answers. They looked hopeful. It looked like they had learned something important in there—just as I expected we would.

“We’ve got a name,” Hotch said, storming into the boardroom. I perked up. “It’s not the name of our Unsub, but it’s someone who can give it to us.” Great, so another goose chase. “Her name’s Katherine Deeid. She’s a retired call girl. Prentiss and Reid, I want you to go talk to her. I want to know if she sold her list of clients to our Unsub.”

Emily and Reid headed out quickly after nodding in Hotch’s direction and grabbing their things. Now, all that was left to do was wait. As useless as it seemed, there was nothing more we could do but wait to see if our lead would pan out—which we knew that it would. I had made the right call with asking to bring Ellen Daniels in, and now we were making considerable process. By the same time tomorrow, we could be back at home with Jac, It would be like we never even left in the first place. Jack couldn’t be upset, and Haley couldn’t blame us for not being around enough. Things were going to work out.

About an hour later, I got a call from Emily. I excused myself from the room because everyone was talking to JJ about her baby. Everyone except for me, at least. I didn’t want to interrupt them yet, so I decided to take the call privately. And just as I anticipated, Emily and Spencer got the information we needed to close this case. Genius strikes again.

“That was Prentiss and Reid,” I said, hurrying back into the boardroom. “They got the name of our Unsub. Megan Kane.”

“Garcia, did you get that?” Hotch asked in the direction of the phone on the desk.

“Got it, boss. Megan Kane…” She took a moment to work on her computer. “Found her.”

The computer in front of Rossi and Hotch lit up with the picture and file of our Unsub. Morgan and I leaned in to see. Her full name was Megan Rachel Kane, and she was the heiress of her father’s ridiculously successful company. We profiled that she was going after men who were abandoning their families, and after making the connection to Megan, it made sense why. Her father left her mother for his mistress. Like Reid and Emily said, she blamed the industry for ruining her family.

“Wait—” Hotch leaned forward to get a better look at the computer. After a silent moment had passed, he sighed and stood up straight, his hands turning into fists. “I _did_ meet her in the elevator the other night before I called the team in.”

“What?” I questioned.

“She was standing behind me… I didn’t get a good look at her because I was thinking about—” He paused and looked around to see that all eyes were on him. He cleared his throat. “Well, I was thinking about _something else_. She mentioned something about the Tokyo Markets, then stepped out. That was all. She blended in so well because she had a suitcase, and she was wearing a pant suit. She looked like everyone else there.”

“That’s part of the ruse. She told you on the phone that you two are alike because you take the back elevators, so you’re not spotted, but you both fit into the crowds so well, too, when needed. That’s how she’s been getting in and out of these hotels undetected.”

Once we knew who we were looking for, and perhaps a reason as to _why_ she was doing all of this, Hotch wanted to seek out answers. He didn’t understand how an Unsub could be right under his nose and he never noticed. That always pissed him off. There were cases before where he couldn’t initially spot the Unsub, or we had no choice but to let them go. Every time that happened, Hotch lost it. So, when he said: “I’m going to talk to her father…” and stormed out of the precinct, I wasn’t surprised. What did surprise me, however, was when Hotch called back about an hour later to tell us that he couldn’t get anything out of the father. That wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted answers, and he knew that there was something going on between Megan and her father. In order to get those answers, he ordered that we put a tail on him. Unfortunately, Andrew Kane shook his tail… Somehow. There wasn’t enough time to ask questions.

“Guys, I might have something,” Garcia said over the call in the boardroom. “Andrew Kane just reserved a room at the Wilmore Hotel. Room 2257. Can I get an ick-ick-icky on making an appointment with your own daughter?”

I cringed slightly. Yeah, I’d give it to her— ick-ick-icky. The good news was, however, that Kane probably just wanted what all the other men in this town wanted: for this to go away; and Megan probably wanted to just kill her father and run. There probably wasn’t any consideration for an “appointment”, as Garcia put it. The other good news was that we knew exactly where Megan was going to be. As long as her father was at that hotel, Megan was going to be there. Morgan and I profiled that the murder of her father was going to be her endgame. What would happen after that was… well, there was no guarantee. She could run, kill herself, try to shoot her way out, or potentially even take someone hostage. All we knew was that it was going to get messy and fast.

So, we hurried to the Wilmore Hotel. Since the Kane’s check in time wasn’t for an hour, we could get there early to set up. The plan was that Morgan, Hotch, and I were going to take the upstairs of the hotel. Hotch and I would be waiting in the hotel room for either of the Kanes to show up, meanwhile Morgan would keep watch in the hallway. The others, being Emily, Rossi, and Reid, were going to stay undercover in the lobby, the bar, and the valet outside. Their purpose was just to give Morgan, Hotch, and I a heads up if they saw Andrew or Megan. Because they would be undercover around civilians, they couldn’t risk attempting to subdue or arrest Megan in plain sight because we weren’t sure what she was going to do. Our best chance was to do it privately up in the hotel room where innocent people weren’t in danger.

At the end of the hour, around when the Kanes were supposed to check in, we heard someone arrive at the door. I cocked a brow at Hotch. We hadn’t heard anything on the comms from the team, so I asked if anyone had eyes on the Kanes yet. All negatives. I exchanged a glance with Hotch as we both pulled out of weapons and steadied our stances. The keycard pressed in and out of the lock, opening the door.

The door flew open.

“FBI! Don’t move!” I shouted.

Ellen Daniels, the lawyer who had been cooperating with our investigation, stood there, dropping her bags, freaking out when she saw the two guns in her face. “He told me to come here,” she mumbled nervously. “I didn’t know why—”

“They played us,” I said to Hotch angrily. “We have the wrong fucking hotel.”

Hotch stepped forward. “Ms. Daniels, do you know where Andrew or Megan Kane are?”

She shook her head while swallowing the lump in her throat. We had really scared her. But, to be fair, we weren’t expecting her, so she caught us off guard, too. The fact that she didn’t have any information for us, however, just made her useless to us. I pushed past her, racing into the hallway with Morgan and Hotch hot on my heels. We needed to find where they really went. There were only four other luxury hotels to choose from in the area.

“Try the Chase Regent!” she called out to us as we waited for the elevator.

We nodded an acknowledgement to her before disappearing into the elevator. When we arrived in the lobby, the team was already waiting for us. We started running to the Chase Regent, which was two blocks away. The cars were out of reach, so running was our best chance.

At the Chase Regent, Rossi dealt with the security at the front door who were asking questions about why the FBI was storming into their hotel. All the while, I raced straight through the lobby, pushing past all of the civilians standing in my way.

“Kane—” I said, crashing into the front desk. “We’re looking for this man—” I pulled out a picture. “This is Andrew Kane. Have you seen him?” The concierge stared at me for a moment. “Hello?! Today, please!”

“Sorry,” he apologized quickly. He started tapping away at the computer. “He just checked in, like, two minutes ago.”

“Was he with a younger blonde woman?”

“Yeah.”

“What room?”

“I’m looking…” He took another moment while I tapped my foot anxiously on the marble floor. “402.”

“Key.” I held my hand out. He connected a new keycard to the room number, then quickly handed it to me, and I took a moment to thank him before running off back to the team. “Room 402.”

“Morgan, Y/N, with me!” Hotch called out as he ran through the lobby. Morgan and I kept close to him, following him to the elevators. When we were inside, Hotch pressed the fourth level floor. “We think she’s gonna kill him?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. If this is her endgame, she’ll do whatever it takes to see herself succeed. With the change in M.O., it’s possible that she’ll just shoot him rather than poison him, since she knows that we’re after her.”

“You’ll take the lead, then,” he said while cocking his gun. “If she has him hostage, you might be able to talk her down.”

“Hotch, she’s obsessed with you. She might listen to you over Y/N,” Morgan protested calmly.

“She’s also angry with me because she sees me like the other men she goes after. She’ll shoot her father or me the first chance she gets. Y/N leads. If that doesn’t work, we adjust accordingly.”

The elevator dinged. When the doors opened, Hotch gave me a look, and I stepped into the hallway first with my gun raised. Room 402 was just to the left, only two doors down. “ _Psst_ ,” I hissed quietly. They looked over my shoulder as I gestured at the open door. “Soft entry in case she has him hostage.”

Hotch took the lead, stepping around me so that he could position himself across from me instead of behind me. I watched him, waiting for his cue. When the three of us were on our toes and ready, Hotch nodded, and I pushed into the hotel quietly. Hotch stepped in first with me and Morgan close on his heels, all of our weapons raised at our eyelines.

The hotel room itself was clear, but I could see Megan sitting on the balcony because of how her blonde hair and red cardigan stuck out. Morgan moved towards the bathroom to make sure no one was in there—likely Andrew Kane—meanwhile Hotch and I carefully tiptoed closer to Megan. We passed the couch and the coffee table first. There was a bottle of champagne in ice, a filled glass beside it, and a loaded gun set in front of them. She was unarmed. Or she was at least trying to give the appearance that she was unarmed. And then I saw her set the other glass of champagne down on the table next to her on the balcony. My shooting stance wavered. Megan’s entire M.O. was poisoning her clients with the champagne they ordered, and it seemed like her father hadn’t even picked his glass up, but there hers was… empty… She had chugged it once she heard us enter the room—or maybe even before that. This was her endgame.

“Stay back here,” Hotch whispered to me while holstering his weapon.

My eyes raked down his figure, taking note of how he was standing tall now, not in a shooting or fighting stance. He knew that she wasn’t going to hurt him. He, too, knew that she was giving up. So, I holstered my weapon as well and told him that I’d call an ambulance. He turned and shook his head at me. It would be too late by the time paramedics arrived.

Megan always said that she didn’t want to disappear. Now, even if her name and her case did disappear, she wouldn’t live long enough to see it. Perhaps that was her point. Whatever happened with her father, it triggered this endgame. Telling how Morgan came back from the bathroom with no sign of Andrew Kane or a crime scene, I figured that he was long gone, and she wasn’t happy because of that.

“Aaron—” I tried protesting after noticing that he was stepping out onto the balcony. He lifted his palm towards me to tell me that it was alright; but I didn’t care if the profile told us that she wasn’t a threat to him. I still wanted him to be careful. “Hotc—” He sat down next to her.

“Nothing will change,” Megan said to him. “Those men… Those _boys_ … They’ll just keep doing whatever they want, and they’ll get away with it every time because of their money and their lawyers.”

Hotch shook his head. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

I watched from a distance, Morgan sneaking up behind me, as Megan reached out to hold Hotch’s hand. I took a step forward to stop her, but I froze when Hotch held her back. For the shortest moment, I remembered that Hotch knew what he was doing. It had been five months since New York. Five months. And that entire time, I had been babying Hotch, treating him like he wasn’t capable of doing things on his own, capable of making the right choices, capable of sharing his kindness and love with anyone who needed him… Hotch was a good man. I knew that, the team knew that, his family knew it, and now Megan Kane knew it. I didn’t have to protect him from holding the hand of someone who was dying and needed the touch of a man who understood her.

Of course, none of this excused what she had done. I don’t think any of us suddenly forgot who she was and what she did; but Hotch was taking this chance to reach out and console her. That was why he was a good man. That was why I loved him. He hardly showed this side of himself to people—especially people outside of our family—but Megan knew his little secret, so there was no point in hiding it from her. He _truly_ didn’t want her to disappear. If it were up to Hotch, no Unsub would ever die during a case we were working. As horrible as they were, they still deserved to live. I mean, they deserved to rot in prison, but they deserved to live unless they were going to harm his team—his _family_. Megan Kane was no threat to him or his team. She was just a girl who was lost and broken, and I could tell that he wished that he could help her.

On one of our first dates, I asked Hotch why he liked being a prosecutor back in the day. He choked on his water and I smiled. I asked him why he responded that way once he wiped his face clean with his napkin, and he told me that no one ever asked him why he liked being a prosecutor, they always just asked why he left to join the FBI. But I already knew the answer to that. I didn’t need him to tell me that he disliked being a prosecutor because it always felt too late to help the victims, so he wanted to beat these guys before they could do more harm. I understood that about him. What I didn’t know was why he liked being a prosecutor. I mean, he did it for so long, there had to be something besides the money that he liked about it. So, he told me that he liked putting the bad guys away for sure. He liked knowing that they were behind bars, and that at least some of them were getting the help and rehabilitation they needed. Hotch wasn’t naïve to the fact that prisons across America were failing their prisoners by not _properly_ rehabilitating each and every one of them, but at least some of them were getting help.

That was why Hotch preferred climbing every mountain imaginable just to take in one Unsub compared to going the easy route of just shooting them dead. What happened with Chloe during the Angel Maker case was a prime example. Hotch tried to get her to turn herself over peacefully. He _tried_ to make a difference, but he couldn’t. Chloe was too far gone, and she raised her weapon, so we all had no choice but to shoot her before she could shoot one of us.

With Megan Kane, she wasn’t going to shoot us. She wasn’t going to even harm us. Hotch felt her touch his hand, and he knew what he needed to do. This wasn’t going to be a good case where he got to take her in and get her the help she desperately needed. There was nothing he could do but sit there and comfort her. And, for some reason, that made my heart wrench in my chest.

“How could your wife leave someone like you? You’re the first man I ever met that didn’t let me down.” Her weak hand fell from Hotch’s. He scrambled to pick it up again and hold it tight. “I asked you earlier, but you dodged the question. Who did you end up with after your wife left? I know the voice of someone pretending to think others are attractive when they’ve already found the one. I’ve heard it so many times before, Aaron Hotchner, and you sound so head over heels for whoever it is.” Hotch looked up at me for a moment before Megan’s gaze followed his and she was staring at me, too. She smiled politely and nodded. “You’re very lucky,” she told me. She slumped back in her seat again and looked at Hotch. “Will you stay with me?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Megan slumped further. Her body started shaking, her breath sputtered, and her grip on Hotch’s hand was non-existent. The pain only lasted a short minute. Hotch held onto her for every second of it, though, and he stayed with her right until the very end, just as he promised he would.

We all hated losing. Each and every one of us hated _losing_ … But Hotch was the worst about it. When he lost, his anger replaced his sorrow, and it took forever to go away. With Megan Kane, he lost. He couldn’t help her, he couldn’t stop the men she was going after, and he couldn’t keep her from disappearing. That was how Aaron Hotchner lost. And there was nothing I could do to change that. As desperate as I was to fix all of his suffering, there was no way for me to prevent this. Hotch, Morgan, and I all knew it.

Hotch looked up at me once she was gone. My eyes softened when I saw how defeated he looked. I mouthed to him, “I love you.” But he didn’t respond. He just looked back at her and squeezed her hand gently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Reaper is coming.


	30. THE REAPER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 4 Episode 18. A month after part twenty-nine.

Hotch’s hand was slowly running up and down my arm as I slept. After a few moments, he started whispering my name and I subconsciously realized that he was trying to wake me up. I groaned and rolled over onto my other side so that I was facing him. His thumb caressed my cheek lightly and I smiled against his touch. It was so early, way too early for anything but a case, but he didn’t seem to rush me awake, so I just continued to enjoy his touch and nothing else. While his hand drifted down to my arm to start gently squeezing and massaging, I leaned over and kissed his shoulder.

“I have to go out,” he whispered, still massaging my arm. I pouted and looked around his shoulder to see the clock on his nightstand. It was still the middle of the night. What the hell was he doing going out so late? I figured that if he was waking me up and seemed in a rush, it was likely due to another case, so I started to move like I was going to get ready for the day. Hotch grabbed my arm gently. “It’s not a case,” he said as though he had read my mind. “An old friend of mine called… He needs to see me; says that it’s important.”

I squinted and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “Why does he need to meet with you right now?”

Hotch shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ll tell you when I get back.” I nodded and laid back down. He kissed my forehead and tried to lean back up, but I caught the back of his head with my hand and brought him in for a kiss on the lips. “I love you. Try to fall back asleep.”

“I love you. Be safe.”

He pecked my lips before crawling off the edge of the bed to sneak out of the bedroom. I rolled back over onto my side of the bed, trying to find the darkness and peace behind my eyelids to fall asleep again, but I was already awake and worried about Hotch leaving. Of course, there was no doubt in my mind that he had a real, legitimate reason for leaving. I wasn’t the kind of person to just assume that he was cheating on me or something, because: one, he wouldn’t; two, he wouldn’t have woken me up to tell me he was leaving if he wanted to keep it a secret. But meeting an old friend so late at night and without warning seemed _odd_ , to say the least. The fact that Hotch didn't know what it was about either put me on edge. What if he was in danger? What if he was going to get hurt and I had no idea where he was or who he was with? How was I supposed to sleep as that raced through my head?

I sat up as I heard his car backing out of the driveway, the headlights still off so that he wouldn’t disturb mine or Jack’s rooms. I brought my knees to my chest and hid my face in my palms. There was no reason to be worried about Hotch. None. Right? I was just nervous for nothing. New York still had me shaken up, still six months later. Every time he was out of my sight, I got worried that it would be the last time I would ever see him. I _hated_ that feeling. I wanted it to end soon. I wanted to trust that Hotch was capable of just going to a friend’s house and that I didn’t need to constantly worry about every little thing he did. He was a grown man; he was going to be fine. But I still loved him, and I still worried about him. That would never change.

When the sun started to rise and my alarm went off, I checked my phone again. Hotch still hadn’t reached out. I tried not to think about it as I pushed the covers off my body and went to get dressed before waking up Jack. He was sure to have questions about where his dad was, and I honestly didn’t have any answers for him. I wished that I could look at him and tell him what was going on, but I really didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure how to _lie_ about where his dad was, that was how out of the loop I felt. So, all I did was tell him that his dad needed to leave early for work and that we’d see him at dinner. Thankfully, Jack bought it, and he started getting ready for school.

By the time I dropped Jack off at school and made it to the office, Hotch still hadn’t called or texted. I was really starting to worry. If he wasn’t in his office, then I was going to storm into Garcia’s office and demand that she track his phone, because I wasn’t about to lose him. Not now. Not when I wasn’t there to help him.

Thankfully, though, after I passed Anderson on my way into the bullpen, I could see Hotch up in his office, finishing up a phone call. I let my shoulders fall in relief. Morgan turned in his seat to wish me a good morning, and I responded with a smile as I dropped my things off at my desk. As I walked towards Hotch’s office, I flicked the back of Morgan’s neck playfully, earning the snap of a rubber band against my elbow.

I scoffed. “I’m telling on you,” I teased, making my way up the ramp.

“Snitches get stitches!” he yelled out to me.

“Only if I get caught!” I winked. “Hey,” I walked into Hotch’s office. He looked up from his work on his desk, quickly hiding away whatever it was he had been reviewing and smiled at me. “You didn’t come home last night. Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’m sorry if I worried you. I was going to call, but I didn’t want to wake you up.” He pushed himself out of his chair, walked about around his desk, and caught me by the waist using his arms. “Are _you_ okay?”

“You had me worried.” I propped myself up on my tiptoes and leaned in for a quick kiss. “I didn’t end up falling back asleep because I thought you would come back or call.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I shook my head understandingly. “I get it. Did you talk to your friend?” I asked while pushing his hair back since he hadn’t run a brush through it yet. He nodded and kissed my forehead. “Care to share with the class?”

He smirked against my skin before pulling back. “Close the door,” he ordered. I nodded, sliding out of his arms to do as I was told. Hotch closed the blinds then met me on the couch. “I went to go see my old unit chief. He’s dying, and his last wish was to speak with me.”

My eyes softened and I ran my fingers on my left hand through his hair. “You’re a good man and friend for getting up in the middle of the night like that to go see him,” I complimented with a small smile. “But why didn’t he send for you sooner?”

Hotch looked over at the door and the blinds again to make sure that no one could walk in or see us talking. Whatever he had to say, it needed to stay between the two of us, and I was alright with that. “Back when I first started working at the BAU, I worked for a man named Tom Shaunessy. He taught me everything I know about profiling and being a good unit chief. In ‘98, we got a case where the Unsub was killing random couples on the highway, and I was the lead profiler for the very first time. We tried to build a loose profile based on what we had, but his M.O. was scattered, his victimology was unpredictable, and there was never any evidence. He got himself involved with the media, though, and they titled him The Reaper. And you know how it goes after the media names them, they usually get cocky and big headed. The Reaper, he started leaving symbols or messages at his scenes in order to taunt us. He killed well over a dozen people, and we never caught him. One day, Shaunessy came in and he sent us all home. He told us that the case was over, the trail had run cold, and we needed to move onto more prevalent cases. He was my boss, so I didn’t question it, and I haven’t even thought about it once in… years…” He looked over at the door again. “Shaunessy called me last night to tell me that he made a deal with The Reaper ten years ago to make the killings stop. We would stop looking for him and he would stop killing. That was the deal between Shaunessy and The Reaper, but now the Shaunessy’s dead, the contract will become null and void once The Reaper finds out.”

“Meaning that The Reaper will start killing again,” it dawned on me as I said it.

Hotch nodded. “He passed the case onto me.”

“Aaron—” I hesitated.

If Shaunessy was half as good as Hotch cracked him up to be, then it meant that he was the best of the best— more so than Rossi or Gideon ever were. The fact that Shaunessy and the BAU couldn’t catch The Reaper ten years ago was enough cause for concern. Would Hotch have to make the same deal? Or would we be able to catch him? Either way, it wasn’t fair of Shaunessy to dump this on Hotch’s lap. I didn’t like that this had him so shaken up. Cases like this hardly ever made Hotch blink twice, but now he was sitting across from me, scared to even tell me the truth. 

“I know, I know,” he insisted. “But what choice do I have?”

“To not put yourself in the middle of this mess!”

“So, do what? Turn a blind eye and let him start killing again? Or do I get ahead of this guy and I finally catch him?”

“Yes, turn a blind eye. If it’s unsafe, then… yeah…”

“Why are you saying that?” he cocked a brow of curiosity, though his tone was more accusing. “You’d never turn down a case, especially if you knew that it was bad and important.”

I pulled my touch away from him entirely. It was a valid question, I supposed. In his shoes, I would have asked the same thing because it was so out of character for either of us to dodge or turn down a case—especially after I had basically just sent him down to Dallas on his own for a bit, even though he didn’t want to go. I had to tell him the truth. That was _our_ deal. We didn’t keep secrets from each other because communication was of the utmost importance in our relationship. But it was starting to get tiresome to keep explaining to him that I was worried about him. That conversation always ended the same way every time. I’d start by telling him that I was still worried about him since New York, he’d counter by arguing that he was fine, and then I’d tell him that didn’t matter because I loved him and I was worried about him, and then it would end with him holding me and telling me he loved me. I’d forget about my worries for a bit, but then it would all come crashing back, and the cycle would continue. But he asked. His question was valid, and now I had to tell him the truth, unfortunately.

“If this guy got the best of Shaunessy, what’s to stop him from doing the same to you?” I asked, rather than answering first.

“I won’t take any deal, Y/N. You know that. I’m going to find this guy, and I’m going to put him away for good.”

“See how you’re saying ‘ _I_ ’? Hotch, this isn’t just _your_ case. We’re all here, and if you do this— which I don’t think you should— we’ll all help you. You can’t do this alone.”

“I have to.”

I raised a brow. “What do you mean?”

“When I turn down his deal, because I know that he will make one, I can’t drag any of you into the mess. Shaunessy and I started this ten years ago; I can finish it.”

“Aaron. No.” I shook my head and stood from the couch. “I’m putting my foot down on this one. I can’t let you do this. If you think that it’s dangerous for us, then it’s dangerous for you. You’re not fucking doing it.”

“Y/N, stop it—”

“No!” I shouted a little too loud. Both of our gazes turned to the door and windows to make sure no one would come in to disrupt us. I took a moment to breathe. “Shaunessy was scared of this guy. _You_ seem scared of this guy. I’m not doing this with you, Hotch. I’m not going to stay up every night for who knows how long while you’re off in Boston, chasing some guy who has had years to build up his thirst for blood. I’m not doing that to myself or Jack— or even the team. I can hardly sleep as it is. I worry about you _constantly_. If you’re going to do this, you need to have the team helping you. That’s my final offer, I swear, Aaron. So help me—”

“Fine!” he also shouted a little too loud, jumping out of his seat. “Just _stop_!” He walked over to me and put his hands on my face, “Stop…”

I let my eyes fall shut and I pressed my face against his chest. “I’ll always fight for you, Aaron. I made that promise to you a while ago. I’ll never stop fighting for you, but I can’t always be worried about you. Does that make sense?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry.” He hugged my shoulders, holding me close to his chest. “But I worry about you, too. And I don’t want you to get mixed up in a mess that I made.”

“Your messes are my messes, Aaron Hotchner. They always have been and always will be. That’s a part of loving you.”

I could feel him smiling as he kissed the top of my head. “Okay,” he gave in. “I love you.”

* * *

Since Hotch and I argued about The Reaper case, it had been a few days. JJ still didn’t have any new cases for us, but that didn’t stop Hotch from sitting in his office late at night and getting there early. He was coming home around midnight every night now, and he was leaving around five or six. Honestly, I don’t even think he was going to sleep. He was probably coming home just to make sure that Jack and I were safe, and to make sure that I was sleeping alright, and then he was leaving. I was worried, and I wasn’t really sleeping, but I feigned it all for Hotch. I was hoping that he’d get some sleep soon, or maybe he’d just spend some more time at home. Jack missed him. He was staying up as late as he could, procrastinating on his homework so that his dad could help him. Even if I tried to sit down and help him, he wouldn’t heed my advice. It was hard for him to know that his dad was in town, but he still didn’t get to see him.

On Wednesday, things still weren’t better. Our ten o’clock meeting came and went with no new cases, and all of my reports were done. Now it was a waiting game for something interesting to happen. Emily and I set up a trash can at the end of the bullpen, and what started as a paper airplane race quickly devolved into just crumpling up pieces of paper and seeing how many we could throw into the trash can from different distances. Once Morgan finished his work, he joined in, too.

“Y/N,” Hotch called calmly from his office. I looked up from my work to see what he needed, yet all he did was nod sideways towards his desk, gesturing that he needed to speak with me privately.

“Ooh, someone’s in _trouble_ ,” Morgan teased.

“Bite me,” I flicked the back of his neck again, just like I had the other day, while passing by his desk. This time, though, he didn’t have a rubber band ready to retaliate, so I made a slight run for it before he could shoot one at me. When I was at Hotch’s office, I closed the door behind me, and made my way over to his desk. He was standing, so I stayed on my feet, too. “What’s up?”

He threw a case file towards me onto his desk. “He struck last night.”

I carefully eyed him through my lashes as I grabbed the file and started looking through the first page. The Reaper. Hotch knew that this was coming, he had anticipated it ever since Shaunessy’s death a couple of days ago, but I didn’t think it would come this fast. It had to be The Reaper considering everything Hotch told me about him. He killed couples on the highway, always overkill with the female, and he left a drawing of an eye on the side of the car using the victims’ blood. This was The Reaper’s work. No one else’s. And, honestly, it terrified me. It meant that Hotch was finally being roped into something that was dangerous. We always knew that Unsubs could get to us one way or another, but this guy, whoever he was, clearly knew how to get to the BAU. He did it with Shaunessy, and now he was doing it with Hotch. I didn’t want us to become targets. But maybe that was the incentive to find him faster.

“I wanted to tell you first because I want to know if you’re still convinced that we need to do this together.”

“I am.”

“No, Y/N. I need you to look at everything in there, and then I need you to look me in the eye and tell me that this is our best move.”

I flipped through every page, taking in every detail of the case almost as fast as Reid would have. This guy wasn’t any worse than half of the cases I had worked while with the BAU, but what was terrifying about him was the control he clearly had over the feds and the media. Hotch was a stubborn man, and he wasn’t going to let The Reaper roll over him like he did with Shaunessy, but the fact that The Reaper managed to do it in the first place… that made him more dangerous than any Unsub I had ever come across. That might sound ridiculous but think about it. Most of the time, the Unsubs we went after were scared of _us_ because they didn’t want to get caught. Even if they were dominant, cocky assholes, they were still playing a game or a dance around us to ensure that they wouldn’t get caught. But they always did. That was why we were good at our jobs. But then this guy came along, and he told Shaunessy: I’ll stop killing if you stop hunting me. And that deal sounded sweet because Shaunessy felt like he was saving lives. The Reaper had ten years to himself after making that deal. Ten years of letting his urge to kill eat him alive. Now that Shaunessy was gone, Boston was going to turn into a bloodbath, and when Hotch was inevitably going to turn down any deal thrown his way, it was surely going to make The Reaper spiral. This was only going to get worse. That was why we were scared. That was why we were _terrified_.

I looked up at Hotch. “We do this together.”

He stared at me for a moment, getting a read on my face while searching my eyes. I held true, showing no fear, despite the fact that it was bubbling in my stomach. I didn’t want him to become a target. I was petrified by the idea of losing him to this maniac while having just survived New York. But I couldn’t let Hotch know that. Ever. If he saw any sign of weakness, he’d pull the case from the BAU, and he’d go down to Boston to do it himself.

“Okay,” he finally gave in. “We’ll go to Boston, then.”

I silently thanked him for trusting me enough to listen to my advice. The other day, when we argued about it, I thought that he wasn’t listening, and that the first chance he’d get, he’d be gone to solve this on his own. But he got the case file, and he immediately confided in me. I was grateful for that. It went hand-in-hand with not keeping secrets from each other, another thing I was appreciating. We had grown so much as individuals, but even more as a couple over the past year and a half or so. It was a relief that he could trust me and talk to me like this. After everything we had been through, it was honestly a relief that he still kept me around.

“I’ll tell the team to meet in the boardroom,” I offered.

“There’s no time. We need to go straight to the jet.”

I nodded and turned on my heels to gather the team. “Grab your gear,” I told the bullpen as I hurried down the ramp.

“Finally!” Morgan cheered, spinning around in his chair.

“Two people are dead, Morgan. Maybe you shouldn’t cheer?”

Morgan grabbed his go-bag, threw it over his shoulder, and stood up. “Finally,” he said less enthusiastically before winking playfully.

I rolled my eyes. “You’re incorrigible.” I grabbed my go-bag. I maneuvered around Emily and Reid as we all started making our way towards the doors.

* * *

On the plane, Hotch immediately dove into what he knew about The Reaper. Everyone thought that we’d have a few minutes to settle down first, but Hotch collected everyone around the four seat table, handed out the case files Garcia had sent to the jet, and started reviewing what he knew from the initial investigation back in the 90’s. The entire time, I watched him closely. I kept up with what was saying, but I was more concerned about the fact that he looked more driven and tunnel visioned into a case than I had ever seen before. It was worrying. Hotch was a hard working man by nature, and he took each and every case as seriously as possible, leaving room for us to still be _us_ outside of work, but he had never looked like this. As I stared at him, he didn’t glance once at me. The human body instinctually recognizes when it’s being watched, so there’s a natural, automatic need to check your surroundings when you get that feeling on the back of your neck. But Hotch didn’t look at me. He didn’t even look at the team. He was just flipping through the pages again and again. It reminded me of the time when Elle was taken hostage in Texas, and all I could focus on was rereading the case file over and over again until Hotch finally stopped me.

So, I did something unexpected.

When everyone was looking down, I reached up and put a hand over Hotch’s. He froze. After a short moment, he looked at me. For the first time on that flight, he stared into my eyes, and he smiled. I squeezed his hand gently before retreating entirely to look back down at the case. Everyone got back to work, too. They obviously saw what I did, even though I hadn’t intended for them to, so they tried to pretend like they weren’t watching.

The Reaper, according to Hotch, was all of the following: Dominant, proud, overconfident, highly intelligent, and news obsessed. Honestly, he sounded like every other Unsub. Issues arose, however, when he started losing the thrill of each kill, so he had to get more creative. He went to the police—specifically Shaunessy—and made that deal to have them stand down in exchange for his “retirement”, which gave him more power. He won back in the 90’s because he had the upper hand. Now that Shaunessy, the only man who truly knew that The Reaper had won, just died, he needed to start killing again in order to gain attention, and probably just to keep himself busy. A hiatus as long as his likely had him itching at his own skin. He was a wild psychopath on the loose with a thirst for blood, which meant that this would only get worse until we could capture him.

“There isn’t much here,” Morgan said after a few minutes. “How did you guys build this profile?”

Hotch sighed. “Technically, we didn’t. This is everything I’ve worked on over time. Back in ’98, this was my first case as lead profiler, but Shaunessy sent us home before we could get much work done. So, now we have to do it.” He closed the file in his hands. “To start, I want Y/N and Reid to come to the recent crime scene with me. Prentiss, Rossi, and Morgan, start building the profile at the precinct. JJ, we need to contain this in the media before it gets him off—”

“I’ll shut it down faster than you can say ‘Boston’,” she said with a smile.

Hotch nodded a “thank you” to her before sighing and resting his head against the side of the plane. He had been rushing to discuss the profile, but now that we had done everything we could, I could tell that he was mentally and emotionally drained. That was what he got for pushing himself too hard. Imagine what would’ve happened if he did all of this on his own.

Over the span of five years, The Reaper managed to kill twenty-one people. By the time Hotch got involved, eighteen people were already dead, and under his watch, three people died. Now that the Reaper was back, two people were already dead. This wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Hotch was already exhausted, and The Reaper had only just begun. Since Hotch knew the truth about Shaunessy’s deal, he had to be vigilant on this case, making sure that it didn’t get personal. If The Reaper found a way to get in contact with us, there was no doubt he would try to offer up a similar deal. Hotch didn’t like letting the bad guys get away. He didn’t like when they died, and he didn’t like when they got away. Therefore, there was no chance in hell Hotch was going to give into any deal. He told me that himself. What terrified me most was that Hotch’s defiance would end with The Reaper going after him… What was I supposed to do then?

When we landed in Boston, Hotch, Reid, and I took a separate vehicle from everyone else. We headed straight to the latest crime scene, as planned, while the others headed to the precinct to get settled. Technically, we weren’t on this case yet. Hotch had gotten wind of this recent crime scene, and he knew that it had to do with The Reaper, so he leapt at the chance. However, this still wasn’t _our_ case. Rules were rules. Hotch was always a rule follower, especially when it came to jurisdiction. If we weren’t invited onto the case, then we had no right to be there. But Hotch hoped that by asking in person, there was a chance that the lead detective on the case, O’Mara, would bring us on to help.

Hotch and I were in the front seat during the drive. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught how white his knuckles were turning as he kept squeezing the life out of the steering wheel. I had never seen him so tense before. I was really worried. If this got personal for him, it was my duty to tell Rossi to pull him off the case. Right? I mean, when cases got too personal for me, Hotch immediately benched me—or at least tried. Especially since New York, there was no way in hell I was going to let Hotch cloud his judgement by making this a personal thing. If he didn’t ease up soon, I was going to talk to Rossi… Or, if it came to it, I’d call Strauss. That wouldn’t exactly make Hotch too happy, but I would do what was necessary in order to protect him. I understood suddenly how he felt about me. Fuck.

He parked the car outside of the yellow tape. “Wait here. I’ll talk to the lead detective about asking us to join the case. We know each other from the first wave of cases. If he talks to just me, he might be more inclined to invite us in.” Hotch got out of the car, leaving me and Reid in silence.

As we waited and watched Hotch head over to O’Mara, I took note of what I could see at the crime scene from a distance. The victims’ car was taped off up ahead. The media was standing around the tape, trying to get a better look at the bodies inside the car and the blood painted on the driver’s side door. There was a trail of blood on the pavement. It had been washed away somewhat by the rain, but the general outline of the blood was clear enough to indicate that one of the bodies had been dragged from the street to the car. Probably the driver.

That was all I could see from where we were, though. Without getting a closer look, I wouldn’t be able to deduce much. I couldn’t even see what the blood spatter on the car’s exterior _looked like_ , I just knew that it was there. And like he could read my mind, Hotch looked over to the car, then waved us over. Reid and I got out, ducked under the yellow tape, then strided over to Hotch and the detective.

“Detective O’Mara, this is Dr. Spencer Reid and Agent Greenaway. The rest of my team is setting up at the precinct.” Hotch gestured to each of us respectively. I shook the detective’s hand, then watched as he tried to shake Reid’s, only to be met with a polite wave. I snorted lightly. Hotch and Reid both glared at me. “Do you mind if we take a look around?”

O’Mara shook his head. With his thick Boston accent, he responded, “Take as long as you need, do whatever you need to do. I trust you, Aaron.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

The three of us turned to look at the car and the bodies still inside it while O’Mara ordered his men out of the way. Reid started reviewing the victims’ information aloud, but I stepped away to think on my own while canvassing the car. As I had seen before from a distance, there was blood trailing from crime scene markers 3 and 7 all the way to the car door. Drawn onto the silver paint was The Reaper’s symbol in blood. I recognized it from the files Hotch showed me when we initially discussed The Reaper. I didn’t know what the symbol was, though. It was an eye with lines coming out of it—almost like eyelashes… or like the protruding lines Jack would draw on a sun doodle to represent the sunrays. Maybe it meant we were being watched? I wasn’t sure.

I looked into the car, leaning in through the window to get a look at the bodies. Hotch came up behind me and handed me a pair of blue rubber gloves. I silently thanked him. While sliding the gloves on, I took note of the male victim’s rolled up left sleeve, revealing that he had a tan line where a watch used to be. According to Reid’s narration, this victim’s name was Evan Harvey. He was a twenty-three year old recent college graduate, traveling to visit his parents with his girlfriend, Nina Hale, nineteen. For a man who was bludgeoned repeatedly, then shot execution style, Evan’s body seemed pretty… intact. I mean, he was hardly recognizable behind all of the blood, but everything else about him looked put together. He was a poster child for a low-risk victim. What stuck out to me the most were the glasses on his face. If The Reaper had beat him with a tool of some kind, Evan’s glasses would’ve been completely shattered, bent, and ruined. They wouldn’t be sitting perfectly on his broken face. So, The Reaper posed him that way. The question was, why?

I stepped out of the way so that Hotch could get a look at Evan while I went around the car to look at Nina in the passenger’s seat. She was in much worse shape than Evan was. His face was the only thing that had been destroyed by The Reaper, but when it came to Nina, every part of her was destroyed. He had started by stabbing her forty-six times. Everywhere from her shoulders, breasts, stomach, even her thighs, were completely torn up from the overkill. And then he slashed her throat to finally end the torture.

“Reid, look at this,” Hotch said as he leaned out of the car. I looked up shortly to see what they were talking about. Hotch had grabbed Evan’s wallet from his pocket to inspect something. “The glasses.”

Reid ducked down to look at Evan, Nina, me, then he stood and looked at Evan’s wallet again. “His eyesight’s perfect. He doesn’t need to wear glasses.”

Hotch sighed. “The Reaper always took something from each of his victims so that he could leave it on the next, that way we knew he was responsible. It was another way of claiming dominance and power. He took Evan’s watch and left George Foyet’s glasses.”

“George Foyet?” Reid inquired.

“The Reaper’s last victim.”

I stood and circled the car again. Crime scene markers 1 and 6 represented the two flat tires on the car. I bent down to get a good look. I glanced around and asked one of the uniforms if they had a carjack. He nodded and raced off to grab one from the trunk of his police car, then returned to hand it to me. I knelt down and started jacking up the car so that I could get a quick look at the tires before Hotch could yell at me for doing so. I didn’t need it to go very far. The second I could see under the tire, I realized what had happened, so I set the car back down and handed the jack back to the cop.

“Nails,” I said, standing up. Hotch and Reid looked at me with curious faces. “There are about seven different five-inch drywall nails embedded in the tire back here.”

Telling by the fact that there were so many nails, and they all seemed to strike both back tires, I was inclined to assume that this was on purpose. The Reaper probably planted the nails in the road, then waited for a random car to pass in order to let fate choose his victims.

“Reid, do you know what the drawing on the car means, if anything?” I asked.

He stepped back to get a better look at it. “The Eye of Providence.”

“Explain.”

He perked up at the opportunity to explain something—since the chance hardly ever arose. “The U.S. Government adopted the symbol in order to incorporate it into the Great Seal in 1782 with the words, ‘Annuit Coeptis’ inscribed underneath. You can still see it on the one-dollar bill today.”

“What does Annuit Coeptis mean?” Hotch asked.

“It’s Latin for fate.”

“The word ‘FATE’ was written on the wall in blood at the Foyet crime scene back in ’98.”

“My best bet, then, is that The Reaper sees himself as the personification of fate.”

“Maybe. But, then, why would he make a mistake like leaving Foyet alive?”

“He survived?’ I asked in shock. After seeing the brutality of this crime scene, I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly survive anything like this…

“Yeah,” Hotch nodded. “Him and his girlfriend, Amanda, were attacked in their car when driving home from a date night. Foyet told police that The Reaper stopped them by pretending to be a lost tourist in need of directions. He stabbed Amanda and stabbed Foyet thirty-two times each.”

“Thirty-two? And he lived?” Reid seemed just as shocked as I was. The likelihood that Foyet could have survived that was next to impossible. He was incredibly lucky. “How did they save him in time before he bled out?”

“The Reaper called the police from the crime scene. There was an off-duty ambulance nearby, so they raced to resuscitate him.”

“He called during each crime?” I interrogated.

Hotch nodded.

“But he didn’t make a call this time.”

“He must’ve learned his lesson last time,” Reid said.

“Hotch,” O’Mara called, hurrying over, “there’s a reporter over there that wants to talk to you. It’s Roy Colson.”

Hotch sighed and silently left to go handle it. I didn’t understand. Hotch didn’t handle the media because that was JJ’s job. Why would some reporter ask specifically for Hotch, especially when we were busy like this, and Hotch was taking all the pressure?

A few minutes later, when Hotch was done talking with the reporter, he walked back in our direction, yet he didn’t stop until he got to the car. Reid and I took the hint. We headed to the car, too, getting back into our seats that we had been in when we arrived, and Hotch started driving off. The ride was silent since Hotch was lost in thought, and Spencer and I were busy with adding our crime scene notes to our files so that we could catch the team up when we would get to the precinct.

When we parked in front of the local police station, Hotch said, “Y/N, when we get inside, I want you to meet up with Morgan and find Foyet for questioning. Last I heard, he went off the grid. You might have to work with Garcia to find him.”

I nodded and headed inside. The team, as expected, was already set up in a boardroom. They had case files and boxes littered around, a fresh, hot coffee pot nearby, and a bulletin board filled with pictures, names, and notes. I sat down next to Morgan. Taking a few minutes to finish up my own notes, I gave Morgan some time to finish what he was working on. After a bit, I asked him if I could borrow his help. He closed his file and looked at me. I explained everything Hotch told me about George Foyet, then said that he wanted us to find Foyet and question him. The issue was, we were going to have to dig to find Foyet, since he went underground.

Morgan immediately called Garcia. I thought it would’ve been fun to figure it out ourselves, but he was being a little lazy, so he wanted to cut corners. Garcia would be able to find Foyet without breaking a sweat.

“Mmm…” she hummed out of curiosity. “I’m gonna have to do some more digging. I’ll call you back when I have something.”

“Thanks, baby girl,” Morgan said.

A few minutes later, after we told Hotch that it would take some time to find Foyet, he insisted that we should give the profile to the local P.D. in the meantime.

I hadn’t actually heard the term “omnivore” used in regards to a profile before. I mean, I knew _of_ it while studying to be a profiler, but I had never heard anyone on the team use it during a case before. We dealt with plenty of omnivores before, sure. But this was different. Since Hotch had been building this profile over the span of _years_ , he was pulling out all the stops. He wanted to sound impressive. He wanted to _be_ impressive. He didn’t want to make it seem like he had just been sitting on his ass since 1998, not doing a damn thing about The Reaper.

The term “omnivore”, in our line of work, referred to a very specific type of psychopath. An omnivore was someone who didn’t choose a specific victim type. They were opportunistic people. If the situation arose for the perfect crime, they would take it. Like The Reaper, for instance. What we saw with Evan Harvey and Nina Hale was due to unfortunate circumstances. He left out nails on the road, then waited around for someone to appear. It didn’t matter _who_ , it just mattered that it happened. It needed to happen because of the fame, not the thirst for blood. Yes, that was always a factor when it came to psychopathic serial killers, but with omnivores, the media and the fame was just as important as quenching that thirst. Because of that narcissistic mindset, it was damn near impossible for omnivores to maintain any kind of close relationship. As always, there were outliers. The Reaper, however, did not pose as an outlier to us. It seemed that his main focus was on the fame and dominating the police. No one would be able to befriend or fall in love with someone like that.

Hotch made it clear that although we were also profiling The Reaper as a Hebephile—someone attracted to younger people, specifically teenagers—that didn’t mean he could get it up. One of the first things any potential profiler would learn was the serial killers who used knives did it because they were impotent. They couldn’t get it up, so they used the penetration of a blade to make up for that. The Reaper _loved_ using knives. We saw the overkill with Nina Hale, and with Amanda, Foyet’s girlfriend. He couldn’t rape them, so he took the next best option. It was important to note that in the profile we gave to the police because we were therefore looking for someone who worked with young girls. A teacher, a coach, a tutor, even a pediatrician. We were especially looking for anyone with a record within the last ten years. There was no way a guy like this hadn’t been arrested previously.

My phone started ringing just as we started wrapping up the profile, I looked to see that it was Garcia. I excused myself from the team. As I stepped away into a private room, I answered the call, not finding enough energy to respond to her sassy pickup line. Maybe I should’ve been snippy enough with her to make her bad news blow over better. She told me the worst thing imaginable: Penelope Garcia couldn’t find George Foyet. There weren’t many times when Garcia couldn’t pull through for us, yet somehow this was one of those times. I didn’t understand. She explained that he had gone completely off the grid, getting rid of his entire past and turning into a ghost. Probably on purpose. I didn’t blame him. If I knew that there was a serial killer out to get me, I’d go underground, too.

“Okay. Thank you, Garcia.”

“You’re welcome.” She hung up without her usual, peppy self.

I sighed and buried my phone in my pocket. I was sorry that I couldn’t match her upbeat personality that afternoon, but trying to keep up with Hotch’s intensity was… well, I was just as exhausted as Hotch was, I was sure.

“What’s wrong?” Hotch asked, stepping into the room and taking note of my worry and confusion.

“Garcia can’t find Foyet,” I admitted. “He’s disappeared entirely in order to hide from The Reaper.”

Hotch shook his head and fished out his phone. “I don’t know how I didn’t think of this sooner…”

“What?”

“I might know someone who knows where Foyet is.”

I perked up slightly. “Really?”

“Yeah. Give me a second to make a call.”

I nodded and stepped out of the room to give him privacy. I leaned against the wall just beside the door frame while biting my nails nervously, watching the team as they talked with some of the uniforms that had questions about the profile they just finished presenting. It only took another minute or so before Hotch knocked on the window on the door. I jumped slightly. As I caught my breath and calmed my nerves, I pushed into the room again.

“So?” I asked.

“I got the address.”

“You want to go?”

He nodded. “You’ll come with me?”

“Always.”

He smiled at me. As I smiled back at him, he stepped forward and kissed my forehead. It was a silent thank you for bearing with him through all of this, but he had to know that I didn’t need a thank you. I loved my job, and I loved him. If something meant a lot to him, I was going to go out of my way to make it mean a lot to me, too. Whatever he needed, whenever.

* * *

It was already getting late by the time we arrived at Foyet’s address. When we first spotted him, he was walking home from the grocery store, his arms full of grocery bags. We gave it a moment to make sure the coast was clear. We didn’t want to accidentally lead The Reaper straight to George Foyet. That wouldn’t have been fair to him. But once we were sure that no one was watching us or him, we got out and met him on the sidewalk.

“George Foyet?” I inquired. He looked up at us with worry. “It’s alright. We’re with the FBI.” He relaxed, but only slightly. I showed him my credentials to make him feel better, and Hotch followed my lead. “I’m Agent Greenaway. This is SSA Hotchner.”

“We’ve met once before,” Hotch said. “Do you remember me?”

Foyet nodded. “Of course. You helped save my life.” He glanced over his shoulder, searching up and down the street to make sure no one was watching us. “Would you mind if we got off the street, please?”

Hotch and I nodded. Foyet pushed past us with a limp, leading us up to a house just down the block. He coughed as he struggled to get his keys out of his pocket while juggling his groceries. I offered to take something for him, and he thanked me before handing me one of the brown paper bags. He coughed again as he opened the door. His coughing was deep, with a painful wheeze that told me this wasn’t just a cough from the cold or because he had a cold. This was a serious, dangerous cough.

As we walked into his small home, he guided us to the kitchen where I set the bag down on the counter for him. He quietly thanked me. I nodded as he coughed again. He sat down at the kitchen table, trying to catch his breath while adjusting his glasses on his nose. At least he got a new pair since his attack all those years ago. That was a plus… Right? Honestly, I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes. I pitied the guy. Getting stabbed as meant times as he did probably affected his health more than we could ever know. And there was no one there to help him. He was all alone, navigating this without any friends, families, or loved ones. I could only hope that if something like that ever happened to me, Hotch and the team could be by my side to support me

“How did you guys find me?” he asked.

“Roy Colson,” Hotch answered.

Foyet’s face fell at the realization. He had been so careful attempting to cover his tracks, but the one person he trusted to keep his identity a secret just betrayed him. “Oh.” He pointed to the medicine on the counter beside me as he started to cough loudly once more. I caught the hint, handing him the orange bottle as quickly as I could. After he popped a pill and swallowed hard, he asked, “Is this going to take long? I don’t want to be late for work.”

“What do you do?” Hotch inquired.

“I’m a freelance computer specialist for the city. I could get fired if I’m late.”

“This won’t take long, I swear,” I said. “We just want you to tell us what you can remember from the night The Reaper attacked you.”

“So, the recent attacks aren’t copycats?”

I shook my head.

“I knew it…” he said woefully. “I was going to propose to Amanda that night… I was going to do it at the restaurant, but I cowered out of it at the last second. We were heading home, and my plan was to do it there. But when we got in the car, he approached our window, pretending to be a lost tourist. I rolled down my window and tried to give him directions… That was when he dropped the map and stabbed me.” He started to cry. “I couldn’t do anything… I just sat there, bleeding out, listening to her scream and cry my name… I wanted to help her—I wanted to _save_ her, but I couldn’t.” He shivered and sobbed. “Do you know how long it takes to stab someone thirty-two times? It felt like years… It felt like I was stuck in that seat every second for years, and there was nothing I could do to make time speed up.” He wiped his tears away with the back of his hand. “I never found the ring. He took it. I thought that he was going to put it on the next victim, but the next one never came…” He looked at me. “What did he put on them?”

“Who?” I asked.

“The most recent victims. You wouldn’t be here unless it was about those murders last night.”

I shuffled on the balls of my feet. “He left your glasses.”

“So, that son of a bitch still has Mandy’s ring?!” He broke down again. “No… You can’t let him put it on another victim. You can’t let him ruin that for me.”

“Mr. Foyet, have you received any odd calls recently?” Hotch interrogated.

He shook his head. “I have multiple residences that I move between randomly so that no one can get ahold of me.”

“What about your work?”

“If they want to talk to me, they have to wait to see me in person.” He grabbed a napkin from the table to use as a tissue. “He likes to kill people in their cars, so I’ve been taking the bus. I’ve done everything in my power to make sure no one can get to me. Especially him.”

“We’ll need your other identities and residences so that we can get ahold of you,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

Hotch pulled out a notepad and pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “We can put you under protection to keep you safe.”

“You can’t protect me,” he scoffed. “No one can.” He started scribbling all of his information down. “You _have_ to be careful with this, Agent Greenaway. Please. I’m entrusting you with my life.”

“I understand.” My eyes pouted in pity. I took the notepad from him. “We can check on you tomorrow, if you’d like.”

“No. The more you come around, the more likely he is to find me.”

Fair enough, I thought. The longer we were with him, the more danger he was in, too. So, Hotch and I thanked him for meeting with us, then left to drive back to the precinct. When we arrived, Hotch paused and sighed before getting out of the car. I eyed him warily. As we crossed the street, Hotch approached a man standing just in front of the entrance to the precinct. When he spotted us, he jumped onto his toes.

“Y/N, this is Roy Colson. He and I met in the 90’s. He wrote the biography on The Reaper.” Hotch sighed. “What are you doing here?”

“This arrived at my office this morning,” Roy said while handing a letter preserved in a laminated cover to Hotch. “I didn’t know what else to do, since you asked me to hold the story and whatnot.”

“It’s just a copy of what he sent to the police during the original case,” Hotch said.

“I know. But the only people who have it are the police and The Reaper. So, if the cops didn’t send it to me, we know who did.”

“We’ll run this in the lab for DNA. Thanks, Roy.”

“No problem.”

“We’ll be in touch again, if we need.”

“Got it.”

Hotch and I nodded politely in his direction before continuing on into the precinct. Inside, Hotch gave the letter to Reid, who was supposed to take it with him to the lab to get it tested for DNA while also inspecting its authenticity. As for the rest of us, however, it had already been a long day. We had done so much already. It was imperative that we take a break, get some rest, refresh ourselves so that we could come back the next day to be as good as new. So, Hotch sent everyone to the hotel for the night.

When we got to the hotel, Hotch immediately sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked so tired. He seemed worn out and worried, which was only worrying me, which would only worry him, and the cycle would continue. It wasn’t healthy. The best way to sort this all out was to get him to just talk to me. He would be reluctant to do so, but I’d force it out of him eventually. Aaron Hotchner sucked at keeping secrets from me. He tried multiple times, and each time I found out, I got pissed. Now, this wasn’t necessarily a secret, but he was certainly bottling something up, and I just needed him to get it off his chest.

So, I strolled over to him and brushed my fingers through his hair. He sighed away his worries. I smiled lightly and kissed his head as I moved to straddle his lap, my knees squeezing his thighs. Hotch grabbed onto my ass to keep me steady. We took a moment to just sit calmly and in silence, giving him a chance to sort his thoughts out because we both knew that I would eventually ask him to tell me everything. I could spare some time to let him breathe. I could spare all the time in the world for him. If just holding me in his arms for a few minutes was all it took to let him catch his breath, then I was fine with that. I would _always_ be fine with that.

I wiped my palms over his face, clearing away any stubborn wrinkles he had from thinking too hard. “You okay?”

“I’m really worried about this one, baby,” Hotch said as I kissed his forehead. “This case has always stuck with me. Why?”

“Because you don’t like letting the monsters roam free.”

He shook his head. “There’s something more than that. There’s something… _off_. It’s just under my nose, and I can’t figure out what it is. I wish I could. But I can’t. I’m worried that my inability to comprehend what’s wrong here is inevitably going to come back to bite me in the ass.”

“You can’t give into all of that fate bullshit, Aaron.” I tucked my hair behind my ears and went to the bathroom to start getting ready for the night.

“I’m just worried…” he muttered under his breath.

The phone started ringing while I was brushing my hair out. “Babe?!” I called out to him, almost like a plea for him to answer it because I couldn’t. I heard him stand from the bed and walk to the phone. It stopped ringing as he answered.

“Hotchner.”

I stepped to lean against the doorframe. Hotch’s side profile was facing me, giving me enough of him to look over in both a lustful and profiling way. I was admiring him and his tight muscles under his shirt. He looked so good like that. His biceps were flexing while holding the phone up to his ear, and it made me want him. But then I saw his pale face. He looked as if he had seen a ghost, and my desire was quickly replaced by worry.

Hotch turned to face me. “You think I’d take that deal?” he asked into the phone. Deal? _Deal_ as in the deal that The Reaper made with Shaunessy? Was that why Hotch looked pale? Did The Reaper call our hotel room? “I don’t care if it’s a good deal.” He was silent again for a bit. “I’ve misjudged you,” he said as his demeanor changed. He was using the profile we built on The Reaper to take the upper hand in this case. Good. “I thought you were smarter than this.” Silence again. “Then you’ve misjudged me.” Hotch’s eyes shot wide and he looked at me suddenly. I pushed off the doorframe and cautiously approached him. His eyes seemed to flutter shut in peace when I put my hands on his shoulders to calm him down. “I don’t make deals. You can threaten me and them all you want, but I’m not going to stop. I’m the guy who hunts guys like you. Threatening them only makes my urge to track you down stronger.” Hotch turned out of my touch so that he could slam the phone down to hang up.

“Was that The Reaper?” I inquired, even though I already knew the answer. Hotch grabbed my hips and pulled me close. He nodded shortly. “He threatened you?”

“And you.”

“Of course, he did,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “But you didn’t take his deal?”

“I told you I wouldn’t.” He draped his arms over my shoulders, keeping me close in a tight hug. “You still believe that my messes are your messes?”

“They always are and always will be.”

The phone started ringing again, making Hotch and I both jump. As we settled, we both chuckled lightly. It was just a phone call. It couldn’t hurt us. So, Hotch leaned over to answer the phone again, and I held onto his elbows, refusing to let go, especially after what just happened. Hotch was protective, everyone knew that, but when someone threatened him, I felt the need to protect him, too. It came with the territory of loving someone like him in our field of work. After the call The Reaper just made to _our hotel_ room, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to let anything happen to Hotch. I didn’t care about what could happen to me. I only cared about protecting him.

“Hotchner.” He turned back to face me while talking on the phone, so I buried my face in his chest, running my fingers over his abs through his shirt. He tensed. “Thanks for letting me know.” His tension wasn’t in response to my light, tickling touch, but to whatever happened on that call. He hung up just as quickly as he had answered. “There’s a new crime scene.”

“It’s only been a few minutes—”

“He knew I was going to turn him down. He was waiting.”

“Aaron, before we go, you need to know that it’s not your fault. If he was really waiting on you, then he was just looking for an excuse to kill someone—”

He pushed me off his chest and went to grab his suit jacket. I watched him silently. When he went to the bathroom to gel his hair back, I sucked in a deep breath, trying to collect my security. He pushed me off because he was upset at the case, not at me. I had to remember that.

“It’s not your fault,” I insisted again as he hurried for the hotel room door. He didn’t listen to me. He started walking down the hallway, knocking on the team’s doors when he passed them. “Aaron, please!” I skipped a few steps to catch up to him. “We knew this would happen!”

Hotch stopped and turned on his heels abruptly, making me crash into him. “He killed seven people on a bus, Y/N!”

I stumbled back. I stared at him in shock for a moment before letting him go on his own. The doors behind me opened. After a moment, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see that it was Reid who had come to check on me. My eyes softened.

“We have a new crime scene. Tell the others.” I shrugged out of his touch gently before walking off, too.

At the crime scene, Hotch was already on the bus, looking around at the chaos The Reaper created. The team, since we had only just arrived, filed onto the bus to get a look, too. As I stepped on, Hotch immediately pushed past me. I scoffed. Then, I tried to make a move to follow him.

“Stay here, kiddo,” Rossi warned, holding up a hand. My shoulders fell in defeat. I stepped out of the way so that Rossi could chase after Hotch instead of me. “It’ll be okay,” he said while passing me.

I sighed and shuffled through the rows of seats, counting the bodies. Yep. There were seven people. The driver up front… He was wearing Amanda’s engagement ring. That was the first thing I noticed. George Foyet begged us to not let The Reaper ruin that good memory for him, and we broke that promise— _I_ broke that promise. How was I supposed to tell him the truth? How were we supposed to give notifications of death to seven different families?

A tear slid down my cheek.

We knew that this would happen. Hotch had been saying since the very beginning that The Reaper would inevitably attempt to make a deal with him, and he would turn it down. But we hadn’t anticipated that the repercussions would happen so fast. There was no time to warn the team, the Boston Police, or even the city. We could’ve saved lives if the deal had come at any other time. That was why Hotch blamed himself. He felt like these seven deaths were on his hands because he wouldn’t make a deal with the Devil. And, honestly, he had every reason to believe that, especially with the note drawn in blood on the window that read: “NO DEAL”.

Besides the “NO DEAL” message, there were three sets of numbers painted onto the windows, too. “1439”, “201”, and “1488”. I cocked a brow. Those numbers… They looked so familiar. I had no idea why, but they were ringing some bell in my head that I couldn’t understand. So, I asked Reid if he recognized them. He shrugged and shook his head. Well, if boy genius couldn’t put it together, then we were fucked.

And then it dawned on me.

“Holy shit…” I raced out of the bus, pushing past Emily inconsiderably, then hurrying onto the road. I stopped for a moment to look around for Hotch. When I spotted him and Rossi talking to O’Mara, I ran over. “Hotch!” He turned to me with panicked eyes. “The numbers—” I pointed to the bus, “They’re Foyet’s address numbers. He knows where Foyet lives!”

“This bus is the 7 line,” O’Mara said, “it runs right by that first address, 1439 Yarbrough.” He was already running to jump into his car.

“Foyet’s in trouble,” I said to Hotch.

Hotch scratched his five o’clock shadow. “We’ll split up and cover each of the addresses. Y/N, go with Morgan to 1439, Emily and Reid will go to 201, and Rossi and I will head to 1488.”

“Morgan!” I called out as I turned around. He looked up at me through the bloody windows of the bus. When I gestured to one of the cars, he nodded, then raced out to meet me there. “Drive,” I told him, tossing the keys in his direction.

As he started the car up, I opened the trunk just wide enough to get ahold of two of the blue bullet proof vests, then slammed it shut and hurried to jump into the passenger’s seat. Morgan started up the lights and sirens. We were off before anyone else. I started putting on my vest while we drove, just to save time. When we would get there, we would have to wait a moment for Morgan to strap his on, but this way we were a little bit ahead of schedule.

The second we were parked in front of the house that Hotch and I met George Foyet at, I tossed him his vest, then got out of the car. I unholstered my weapon. As I glanced around the street, I saw O’Mara’s car parked just a few houses down. When Morgan was ready, he unholstered his gun, too, and turned on the flashlight he had attached to his. Fucking hell, I needed to upgrade mine like that. Maybe I could beg him to do it for me for my birthday or something.

We ran up to the front door, but I held him back when I saw that it was open. O’Mara must’ve already gone inside without back up. Idiot. That being said, we still had to clear the house ourselves, just in case. The best way to do that was to take a floor each. Morgan and I agreed that he would check the ground floor, meanwhile I’d race upstairs to clear the upper floor.

“Don’t shoot O’Mara,” I whispered.

Morgan rolled his eyes, then pushed the door open. As he ran into the pitch-dark living room, I skipped up the twelve steps of the stairwell. At the top, I took notice of how many rooms there were to clear. Three. A bedroom, a bathroom, and a spare room. I held my breath as I turned into the spare room. There was absolutely nothing in there. Foyet probably didn’t choose that as his bedroom considering how close it was to the front door. I didn’t blame him. So, I moved onto the bathroom. Nothing and no one.

I froze as I turned into the bedroom. Detective O’Mara’s body was on the floor, his shirt drenched in his own blood from being stabbed dozens of times in the back. His gun was nowhere to be found. My breath quivered as I quickly stepped into the room, clearing the corners before someone could jump me, then checking the closet and the bathroom to make sure no one could get me like they did with O’Mara. There was no one there, though. I was all alone. Well, alone with O’Mara’s dead body, but still. The concern was that there was no sign of Foyet, no sign of The Reaper, and there was a dead cop on the floor.

Suddenly, the sound of a window breaking echoed throughout the house. “Morgan!” I cried out. I jumped onto my toes and started racing back downstairs. “Morgan!” I called again when he wasn’t responding. I ran into the living room to see the front window completely smashed open like someone had been thrown through it. I heard painful groaning coming from the front yard. “Morgan!” I peeked out the open window frame with my gun raised. “Morgan, no—” I saw him lying on his back in the grass. He was half awake, barely writhing around, still groaning in agony. I jumped out the window and fell to my knees beside him. I grabbed his face long enough to see that his eyes were fluttering open. “Morgan, where is he?” He didn’t respond. “Is he still here?”

“No…” he croaked weakly.

“Where did he go?”

Morgan didn’t respond again. I figured that he only had enough strength to warn me that The Reaper was gone, and that was all. He did good, though. It meant that I could call in for help while staying with him instead of going back into the house to keep searching for an Unsub who was long gone.

I pressed the comm on my shoulder. “Morgan’s down! We need back up. O’Mara’s dead, Foyet’s gone, and The Reaper left after attacking Morgan!” I put my hands back on Morgan. “Look at me, Derek. Keep your eyes open.”

He groaned and tried to hand something to me. “Take—” He couldn’t finish what he wanted to say, but I caught the hint, quickly taking what it was that he was holding onto.

My face fell. “Morgan…” I turned the bullet over in my palm. “I…” A tear slid down my cheek. He always took something from his victims and gave something from the last one. What I didn’t understand was why he didn’t leave something from one of the last victims. Why this bullet?

“Cred—” He groaned and patted his pocket. “My… Creds…”

I frantically looked into his pocket, ignoring how weird it would’ve been if it were anyone but my partner. I was shocked to find that his credentials weren’t in his pocket, though, which was probably what he was trying to tell me in the first place. The Reaper left a bullet, but took Morgan’s FBI credentials—the thing that identified him as an agent. The thing that represented how far he had come since Buford. How did The Reaper know to take that one thing?

I pressed my palms against his cheeks. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Foyet…”

I shook my head. “I don’t know where he is.”

“No—” He gasped for air. “The kitchen… Blood…”

“Is Foyet dead?”

“I don’t know.”

He gasped again, this time more deeply as he caught his breath. He was already sounding better, but he wasn’t _looking_ better, which was a concern. I knew that he was going to shrug this off. The minute he could sit up, he was going to insist that he was alright, and he would want to get right back into the case and the field. Over my dead body… For a lack of a better term.

Sirens started approaching from the distance. I sighed with relief, but I never stopped holding him. I shouldn’t have split up from him. We learned this lesson years ago when Hankle took Reid because he split apart from JJ. Every time we split up, something bad happened, and I should’ve known that this time would be no different. We could’ve cleared the house together. It wouldn’t have been that hard. Sure, it would have taken longer, but at least he wouldn’t have been attacked by The Reaper.

The lights of the ambulances started flashing through the street. I waved one of my arms in the air, signaling that we were still on the lawn outside Foyet’s house. They pulled up in front of the house and the paramedics jumped out. I stepped back. As they started attending to Morgan, I saw one of the team’s cars pull up, too. I prayed it was Hotch. When I saw that it was a worried Emily and Rossi getting out of the car, I felt my heart sink a bit.

Emily ran straight over to me while Rossi went inside to start dealing with the crime scene. “What happened?” she asked me.

I looked back at Morgan, who was now sitting upright. “We split up to clear the house. I found O’Mara’s body in the bedroom upstairs when I heard a fight break out in the living room. By the time I got downstairs, The Reaper was gone and Morgan was barely conscious.”

“Where’s Foyet?”

“I don’t know. Morgan checked downstairs, and he started to tell me that there was a lot of blood in the kitchen, but no sign of Foyet.”

“The Reaper could have taken him.”

“Maybe? But, then, why wait around for us to show up?”

“For the thrill kill? He thought that he could kill Morgan, which would up his game from civilians, but then you came downstairs, so he had to run.”

I watched as Morgan was lifted off the ground by the paramedics and taken inside so that they could start giving him stitches. Emily and I followed them, but I stayed out on the porch to catch my breath. I could have lost Morgan. I left him, and I could have lost him. How was I supposed to live with that? I should’ve been there. This wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t split ourselves up.

“Y/N—” Hotch called desperately, running up the front yard to meet me on the steps. I turned away from the doorway just in time to catch Hotch in a tight embrace. I hadn’t anticipated that he would do such a thing while we were at work and the team was around, but, honestly, I was glad that he did because after what happened, I really needed it. “Are you alright?” he whispered into my ear while squeezing me until I practically couldn’t breathe.”

“Yeah,” I answered through a strangled breath.

Hotch released me entirely. I caught my breath slightly before looking up to see that he was pale with worry again, but this time his eyes were red. “I shouldn’t have split us all up.”

“Hotch, you didn’t know—”

“He threatened you, Y/N. I shouldn’t have let you—”

“We’re doing our jobs. This isn’t the first time an Unsub has made it personal, and it won’t be the last. I need you to calm down for me, Aaron. Please.”

“Is Morgan alright?” he croaked.

I stopped. He was… He was trying not to cry. Aaron Hotchner— SSA Aaron Christopher Hotchner… was trying not to _cry_ during a case. He never showed emotion while we were on the job. Ever. Yeah, okay, maybe he would get annoyed or upset by something, but he tried to hide it until we were at least alone or something. I didn’t understand why this was really getting to him. There were hundreds of other cases where something went wrong, something didn’t go according to his plan— and, of course, he was upset, but never like this. He didn’t break down in front of people like this. Why? Why now? Why this case?

Brushing his hair off his face always seemed to calm him down, so I started with that. As the paramedics that had been attending to Morgan’s wounds exited the house, I cupped Hotch’s cheek, letting him press tenderly into my palm. “He’s okay. We’re okay.”

“I shouldn’t have let you guys come here on your own.”

I ran my fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp smoothly. “Please, don’t blame yourself. He needs you to hold it together just for a little longer—we all need it.” I didn’t _want_ to tell him to hide his emotions. I knew that it wasn’t healthy to keep it all bottled up. But if Morgan saw how worried Hotch was about him, Morgan would fly off the rails. “The Reaper took Morgan’s credentials.”

Hotch’s eyes widened. “What did he leave?”

“A bullet.”

“To tell Morgan that he could have killed him… He owes his life to The Reaper.” He turned and punched the wood column standing at the edge of the porch. He whimpered quietly at the pain. “Fuck.”

I grabbed his hand, immediately tending to his bloody knuckles. “I’ll get you some ice. Go inside.”

Hotch kissed my temple as he passed by me. When he was out of sight, I hid my face in my palms, trying to choke back the sob that was building in my chest. How did all of this go so wrong? From the deal, to the bus, to Morgan getting attacked by The Reaper? It was wearing me down. I was exhausted physically and mentally. If I didn’t get to rest soon, I feared I was actually going to tear my own hair out.

* * *

As I suspected, Morgan insisted on not being benched once we got back to the precinct. Hell, he didn’t even let the paramedics take him to the hospital. The worst part, however, was that I was too tired to fight him on it, and he knew that. He knew that I couldn’t make him sit out of this, and he used that against me. I was pissed for a bit. I’d be the first to admit that I was glaring at Morgan as we got coffee together in the break room, then went to sit down with the team in the boardroom to revisit our profile. But then I realized something. I was only mad because I was worried about him. I was frustrated that he wasn’t taking care of himself and that I couldn’t do anything to help him. That was when my focus changed to Hotch. He had taken his anger out on me earlier, after the deal was made, because he was just worried about me. I couldn’t blame him for that now that I felt the same way about Morgan.

Hotch held the new ice pack I got him from the freezer in the breakroom against his swollen fist as he asked the team, “Why is he so focused on Foyet? What’s so special about him?”

There was an obvious answer, but I was going to let it slide considering how tired we all were. The truth was, The Reaper was obsessed with Foyet because he was the only one that got away. He was his last victim before making the deal with Shaunessy. But those answers weren’t good enough for Hotch. Something was still bugging him, therefore, he wanted us to dig deeper.

“What about Amanda Bertrand?” JJ asked. “Foyet’s girlfriend.”

“He told us that she was the love of his life, that he was going to propose the night she was murdered. He looked… distraught… It seemed real,” I answered, staring at Hotch. I wouldn’t know how to react either if I lost Hotch. Even years later, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to move on from something like that.

Morgan furrowed his brows and looked into his notes. “But, she just got here from Michigan.”

“What?”

“How long had she been here?” Hotch inquired.

“Four weeks,” Prentiss answered.

My jaw fell agape. To be fair, I supposed I couldn’t blame them. Hotch and I started going out about a month into my promotion at the BAU. It was possible that George Foyet and Amanda Bertrand fell in love at first sight. Who was I to judge? JJ…

“Wait, didn’t our profile say that he’s a Hebephile?” JJ asked. “He was a teacher’s assistant back then. He worked with Amanda’s class— That’s how they met.”

“Oh, my…” I trailed off when the realization hit me like a train.

We trusted him. We were invited into his home, and we were convinced by the tears he shed for Amanda. I was blinded by his illness and the love it seemed he still had for her. I—I should’ve… I should’ve seen it sooner. If I had, O’Mara would still be alive, and Morgan wouldn’t have gotten hurt. Even the suspicious things he said, like, “Do you know how long it takes to stab someone thirty-two times?” He played me with the empathy card. He made me pity him. Somehow, he knew that it would get under my skin by pressing the love button over and over again. I felt so fucking stupid.

“Colson went to see Foyet,” Hotch said after a moment of shock. “George Foyet is The Reaper—Someone call Garcia and tell her to get a trace on Roy Colson’s phone.” He leapt out of his seat, throwing the ice pack to the side, and hurried to get his vest back on. The rest of the team followed suit while JJ called Garcia.

By the time we had our vests on, Garcia had already sent us the location of Colson, and likely Foyet, too. On our way to the car, I apologized to Hotch for not seeing it sooner. He told me that it wasn’t my fault, the same way the bus massacre wasn’t his fault. I shook my head in denial. We got into the car with Morgan and Rossi.

“My _thing_ has always been profiling people and scenes with a glance. I’ve always done that. I should’ve done better. I shouldn’t have let my guard down because—”

“Y/N,” Hotch interrupted while speeding out of the parking lot, “no one ever saw it. Since ’98, no one put the pieces together. He stabbed his girlfriend, called the police a mile down the road, drove back, then stabbed himself thirty-two times. Of course, no one was going to suspect him. He played the victim and love card on us both, and we fell for it. This isn’t your fault. You have to believe me.”

I slumped in my seat. Defeat coursed through me. I didn’t know what else to do but sit in silence.

At the location Garcia gave us, Hotch and Emily turned off the sirens and lights on the cars so that we could approach quietly. As we silently stepped onto the pavement, Hotch gestured with two fingers that Rossi, Emily, and Reid should go around back, then I would go with him and Morgan to the front door. We needed to close off all possible exits. So, we waited for the other half of the team to canvass the backyards for possible escapes, but when we had the go ahead, we stormed up to the front door.

“We’re inside,” Rossi whispered into his comm.

“Go,” Hotch told Morgan.

Morgan nodded, then winced as he kicked the door open. We hurried into the living room to find Roy Colson sitting at a table with George Foyet, the latter holding a gun to Colson’s head. They both noticed us immediately. Colson’s relief was countered by Foyet’s furiousness that we had interrupted his plans.

“It’s over,” Hotch said, stepping in front of me and Morgan.

Foyet stood. “Stop there or I’ll kill him.” He cocked his gun.

“No, you won’t. You need him to write your story,” I said after noticing the computer open in front of Colson.

“Then, I’ll take him with me. I’ll let him go as soon as I’m safe.”

“No, you won’t,” Hotch said. “You’re going to kill him, regardless. But, here’s the secret, Foyet: you kill him, I kill you. Got it?”

Foyet snorted. “You think I’m afraid to die?” He gestured to his chest, referencing how he had stabbed himself for the sake of throwing us off his trail.

“I think you’re narcissistic and greedy. You’re only afraid to die if it means no one will remember you. If you do this now, no one will remember you. You’ll disappear. If you keep him alive, however, he’s going to write another book about you—this time naming you, making you more famous than you’ve ever been before. People will make movies and documentaries about you if you’re still around to tell your story. But if I kill you here and now, they might make one documentary about The Reaper, who was never found or heard from again, and then they’ll forget all about you. Is that what you want? Because I can make that happen.”

Foyet’s attention turned to Morgan. A slow grin grew on his face. “Well, hello there, again, Derek.”

“Don’t talk to him,” I snapped.

Foyet smiled at me before putting his gun down. “Fair enough, princess.”

Morgan immediately holstered his weapon, switching it out for his handcuffs. He hurried to pull Foyet’s arms behind his back, then cuffs his wrists together as tightly as he could, earning a groan and an ear to ear grin from Foyet.

“Where’s my badge, you son of a bitch?” Morgan asked angrily.

Foyet’s eyes were trained on me, though. He was staring straight into my soul, as if he could somehow see under my clothes, into my heart and brain, like he was drowning in the color of my eyes. It ran a chill down my spine. I tried looking away to ease my perturbation about it, but what he said next made me look back up at him.

“See, I get it now, Aaron,” Foyet snickered. “She’s gorgeous.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Morgan hissed before pushing Foyet forward.

“I’m going to be more famous than you even realize, Aaron Hotchner! Watch me!”

Roy and I let out shaky sighs at the same time once Morgan shoved Foyet out of the house. I turned to Hotch. He was fuming, I could tell. So much had happened, and he felt like all of it was his fault. It wasn’t of course. I was the one who pushed him to take the case, to bring the team along, to keep me close so that I could keep an eye on him. We just hadn’t anticipated this mess. We didn’t expect that Morgan would get hurt and that Foyet would creep me out on purpose. It was so odd to see him go from that shy, sick, broken hearted man to that confident, angry, sociopathic man that had just stared into my soul moments ago.

Hotch stared at me from across the room. His eyes searched mine, trying to replace the disgusting feel of Foyet’s stare with his loving, calming, dark chocolate gaze. I relaxed a bit. He pouted his eyes at me in a way that said: “I love you”, and I returned the favor.

* * *

On the jet, I sat with Hotch in the back where the two seats away from everyone else were. He had me sit next to the window so that he could hold my hand under the table. Morgan and Emily were talking on the couch, and Reid had his hand on JJ’s stomach, feeling the way her baby kicked. It creeped him out. Of course, Spencer Reid, Knower of All Things, would be creeped out by a baby kicking and hiccupping inside a mother’s stomach. He was so funny when he was naïve. But it was good that they were all distracted. The fact that they had their own things going on meant that they weren’t focused on us. That gave Hotch a chance to hold me.

At some point, after Rossi left the bathroom and took a seat across from JJ and Reid, I even rested my cheek against Hotch’s shoulder. We hadn’t slept in so long. We were so fucking tired. While we were obviously eager to get back to Jack, I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to have one night to ourselves where we could rest, then tomorrow, to distract Hotch, we could play with the black box before picking up Jack. It was a good plan. It sounded like a nice plan, honestly.

When JJ’s phone started ringing, it woke me up slightly. I lifted my head long enough to look up at Hotch to see that he had just woken up, too. I chuckled at him before poking his dimple. He was cute when he was sleeping. He was even cuter when his eyes were barely open, but he could still see me smiling, so he instinctively smiled back at me. We were going to be okay.

We looked over as JJ got off the phone. She swallowed hard and looked at each of us in silence. I felt my smile fall. She didn’t look well— not that something was wrong with her or the baby, but because whatever happened on that call made her heart sink. Everyone sat in silence, waiting for her to give them answers. If it were just another case, she would’ve told us, or if it were something wrong with reports, she would’ve told us. This was different. She looked petrified with fear.

“George Foyet escaped custody.”


	31. DAY AFTER CANADA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 5 Episode 01. Two months after part thirty.

Hotch was quiet on the flight home from Canada. He chose to sit by himself in one of the single seats, and no one took the seat across from him. Everyone needed their space, and no one wanted to talk… Not after that case. Getting a few rough cases here and there came with the territory, we all knew it, but there were times when the cases were unbearably bad, and no one knew what to say. We all did our jobs, we did everything we could, but we had let at least eight-nine other people down. Eighty-nine people lost their lives before we finally caught the brothers responsible, and in the end, it didn’t even matter. Both brothers had been killed, and the man who had come to us with the case because his sister had gone missing was going to prison because he was responsible for one of the brother’s deaths. We did everything we could, but it wasn’t enough. Eighty-nine innocent people died, those brothers lost their lives, and the life of the man who came forward was practically over. Everything we did just wasn’t enough, and Hotch couldn’t bear it.

Jack looked to us to be superheroes. He saw Hotch and I as the real-life Superman and Wonder Woman… And in the strangest of ways, we had let him down, too. We couldn’t be the superheroes him and the ninety-three others involved needed. It felt wrong to know that we were headed home and Jack would ask us how the case went, and we would have to lie by telling him that we saved the world again. But who did we save, really? Future victims, sure, but we should have stopped it long before there were already eighty-nine lives lost.

Morgan sat in the window seat next to me, Garcia across from him, and Rossi across from me. None of us exchanged glances. Garcia and Morgan were both staring out the windows, while Rossi was writing in his notepad, and I was staring at Hotch from across the plane. He looked so upset, and I wished there was something I could do to ease his conscience, but what would I possibly tell him? He knew that it wasn’t his fault, yet he still felt the need to put the blame on himself. Anything I could possibly try to console him with wouldn’t work, and I knew that because if he were to tell me the same things, I wouldn’t have believed him. That was how bad it was.

When we landed in Quantico, everyone talked about getting drinks together as they made their way to their cars. JJ opted out because she wanted to go home to Will and Henry, and Morgan declined by telling them that he had to finish up some paperwork— which was a lie because I was the only one with any paperwork that actually needed to be done before our long weekend would start. Yes, our long weekend. Hotch made a call to Strauss before we boarded the plane and said that the team needed an extra day or two before coming back. Somehow, that shit actually worked, because she gave in and gave us Monday and Tuesday off. Only problem with that, though, was that I had things that were due _for_ Strauss by Monday morning, and if I wasn’t coming into work that day, then I needed to get it done before going home.

So, when they asked me and Hotch if we wanted to go with them to the bar, he and I answered at the same time. He had thought that we were going straight home, but when I said I had to finish some work, he backtracked to ask me what I meant. I explained and he said that he would stick around to help me, but I could see in his eyes just how tired he was, and I didn’t think it was fair to make him stay up, especially since we were supposed to go to Jack’s soccer game the next day, and he needed to be well rested in order to support Jack. Morgan cut in by offering to drive me home after we were done, since he was “also staying to do some work”.

Hotch searched my eyes, “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Just go get some sleep. I’ll be home before you know it.”

“Okay,” he whispered. He grabbed my hand and tugged lightly, pulling me close to him. His hand released mine before cupping my face, and he kissed me. “I’ll see you at home.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Hotch parted from me and shook Morgan’s hand. “Straight home the second you guys are done.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgan nodded with a smile, knowing that Hotch was just teasing in his own way.

Hotch waved bye to me as him and the rest of the team headed towards their cars, and Morgan and I headed inside the building. Up in the office, I sat at my desk and collected everything I needed to work on. Morgan grabbed his chair from his desk and dragged it over to mine. I chuckled and commented that I thought he had his own work. He lied by telling me that it could wait, and he took half of the work I needed to do for himself. I didn’t argue against it, honestly. He was there, offering to help, and I just wanted to get home to Hotch as fast as I could. We had some time off, and he was under a lot of stress, and I had an idea or two about how to take his mind off of things. That was what encouraged me to take on Morgan’s help and just try to speed through the work as fast as we could.

Few hours later, as the sun was starting to come up, Morgan and I finally finished all of the work. I sighed and slumped back in my chair, pouting up at Morgan. “Come on, sunshine,” he cooed, pushing himself to his feet, “I gotta get you home before Hotch starts to worry and ends up killing me for not taking you back home sooner.”

I groaned, “Can’t I just… fall asleep here and ask for Hotch’s forgiveness later?”

“Nope, because _I_ do not have a death wish. You might, but I don’t.” Morgan took my hand and pulled me onto my feet. I whined again before collecting all our work in my arms to take to Strauss’s office. “Put a little pep in your step, go on.”

I stuck my tongue out at him before turning on my heels to walk to Strauss’s office. The door was unlocked, so I stepped right in and put down all of the files on her desk before hurrying out. Her office reeked of witch’s brew, I swear. I hated the bitch herself, but even her office was unpleasant. How was that even possible? Honestly, I didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

Morgan was holding both of our go bags when I came back. If he wasn’t before, he was now just as eager to get home as I had been the entire time. I grabbed my bag from him and we headed out to his car. As people were flooding into the office for the day, we were only just leaving, which caught the attention of a few. On our way out of the parking lot, I asked if Morgan would mind stopping at a drive thru so that I could grab Hotch some breakfast as my “sorry for not coming home when I said I would” gift. Morgan told me that I was lucky that he was hungry, too, and that was the only reason he was going to take me. I knew that was what he _said_ , but he was actually dying to get food and didn’t view my question as an imposement.

While in the drive thru after ordering, waiting behind a line of cars to get up to the window to pay and get our food, I texted Hotch good morning and that I had a surprise for him. Actually, I had _multiple_ surprises, but he didn’t need to know that. I was just excited to get home, spend some time with him, then go to Jack’s game in the afternoon, then maybe take him and Haley out for dinner. It was going to be a good day.

Hotch’s lack of response didn’t surprise me. It had only been a few hours, and if he had only just fallen asleep, he wasn’t going to wake up just for a text. If I really cared enough to bother him, I could have just called since his phone always had the ringer on, but I wanted to let him sleep. The text was more precautionary than anything. While I certainly had some surprises in mind, I didn’t need them to be ruined by the fact that I didn’t listen to him and he would inevitably try to punish me for it. So, it was better to be safe than sorry by sending a text his way.

Morgan’s phone started to buzz as we pulled up to the window. He answered the call while simultaneously handing the drive thru employee his credit card. He sighed and looked over at me, which told me that our long weekend wasn’t going to actually be a weekend at all now. Whatever it was, it had to be important enough for JJ to call us back in after just getting off another case.

“Yeah, they’re here with me,” Morgan said into the phone before grabbing his card back. He reached back out the window to grab the bag of food. “Text me the address. We’ll meet you there.” He handed me the food and started driving. “Yeah, call Hotch again. Okay. Yeah. Sure, sure. See you in a few.”

“So much for our long weekend,” I said to him as he hung up and threw the phone into the cupholder.

“I don't get it. Is there really no one else Strauss can give these cases to? It’s like she enjoys giving us something, just to take it away right before it’s ours.”

“She’s a bitch, we already knew that.”

Morgan chuckled, “You’re telling me.”

I noticed that we weren’t driving back to the office. Morgan was taking us towards D.C. “Why aren’t we meeting at the office?” I asked.

“JJ says that it’s an emergency and we need to go straight to the crime scene.”

“Geez,” I mumbled. “It must be bad.”

* * *

When we arrived at the crime scene, Rossi and Emily were already waiting outside for us. None of us were happy that our long weekend had been cut short before it even technically started. I asked if they got any sleep, and they said they got about an hour, but that was it. JJ had told us all the same thing: go straight to the crime scene because it was urgent. That was it. Not very interesting, and it certainly didn’t _sound_ that urgent. We all agreed to head up together, anyhow.

JJ and Reid were already up in the apartment where the crime scene was located. Reid was taking a look at the body on the floor while JJ was talking to the lead detective on the case. As we walked in, Morgan and Rossi went to introduce themselves to the detective, Emily went to look around the apartment, and I crouched down next to Spencer to examine the body with him.

The victim was lying on his back, his eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. He had been shot once in the chest, and from the diameter of the wound, it looked like it was an up-close kill with a revolver of some kind— Reid would know more about the specifics of the weapon used if I needed to know. There were no other wounds. No sign of a struggle, no sign of torture, no sign of post-mortem abuse. So why had we been called in for this case?

“His name was Nelson Martinez,” the detective addressed our team. “From what we can figure, he answered his door, was forced into the apartment at gunpoint, then shot in the chest.”

“Doesn’t seem like an organized killer at all,” I said, pushing on my knees to stand up.

Morgan agreed. “Why have you asked for our help on this case?”

The detective nodded like he was the question coming. “Two days ago, we got a call from a local doctor named Tom Barton. He’s somewhat popular in the community because of all of the fancy awards he’s been given over the years. Anyhow, he said that he found a note addressed to him at the hospital he works at. The letter stated that this person was going to kill Dr. Barton’s son, and that if he tries to hide his son in order to protect him, someone else will die each day in his place.”

“And you think that this murder is connected… how, exactly?” Emily asked, returning from the bedroom down the hall.

“The note was signed by L.C. This murder, and the ones over the past two days have all been accompanied by those very initials being written in chalk next to the bodies.”

Sure enough, there were the letters L.C. written right beside Mr. Martinez’s body.

“Where’s Barton and his son now?” Rossi asked. We knew that the next step was figuring out how the Bartons ended up in this position, and how we were going to protect the son without letting anyone else die in his place. “Have they been alerted that these murders have actually been taking place?”

“They’re both at home. They know about the other two, but they don’t know about this one yet,” JJ said.

“We should head there and talk with him and his son to figure out who’s doing this,” Morgan said.

I looked around the room, “Where’s Hotch?”

JJ shrugged, “I tried calling him, but he didn’t pick up. He probably fell asleep and his phone’s just on vibrate. I’ll tell him to meet us at Barton’s house.”

“Wait, no— that’s not possible,” I told her. “Hotch never puts his phone on vibrate, and he always picks up the phone, no matter who’s calling.”

“It was already hard enough pulling all of your asses out of bed,” she chuckled. “I’m sure he’s just out of it. He’ll meet us when he wakes up. We’ll be fine without him for a few hours.”

“JJ, I’m telling you that Hotch would have picked up the phone. Let me go home and check on him. If he’s just asleep, I’ll drag him out of bed myself.”

Rossi stepped in my path and decided to pull rank with me. “You can’t be worried about this right now. Hotch is a big boy, he can take care of himself. For now, let’s work this case, alright?”

I bit my tongue. Why wasn’t anyone believing me? They knew that Hotch was always the first to pick up his phone for anything and anyone. It was unlike him to not answer his phone— even if he were dead asleep. His phone _always_ woke him up and he _always_ answered. Something was wrong, and the team wouldn’t listen. It was so aggravating. Not to mention that way Rossi pulled rank on me just to make sure I wouldn’t go checking on one of our team members. That felt so fucked, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just had to get back into Morgan’s car with him and let him drive me to the Bartons’ residence out in the suburbs.

I tried calling Hotch myself as Morgan drove, and he didn’t answer. Maybe there was reason to worry earlier when he hadn’t responded to my text. I hadn’t thought anything of it initially, because, like JJ and the others, I figured that he was probably just asleep; but the fact that he wasn’t answering anyone’s calls meant that he didn’t have his phone, and Aaron Hotchner never went anywhere without his phone. Even if it were dead, he would have called me or someone else from the house phone just to let us know that it was charging back up again in case we needed to contact him. There were so many signs pointing to Hotch being in some kind of trouble, yet I was barred from doing anything about it by my superior.

At Dr. Barton’s house, as everyone was asking him questions about himself, his job, and his son, I was texting Hotch’s phone to see if me spamming his phone would be enough to alarm him and make him pick up the damn phone.

“Focus up,” Morgan whispered, kicking my ankle. I immediately tucked my phone away in my back pocket and cleared my throat to get rid of my guilty face. “He’s fine. You saw him, he looked really tired. Everyone sleeps in by accident sometimes.”

“Not Hotch,” I whispered back. “Never Hotch.”

“Are we boring you two?” Rossi whispered, leaning in between us.

Morgan and I both shook our heads and focused back on the questions Emily and the lead detective were asking Dr. Barton. His son was upstairs, aware that there was some kind of danger to them at the hospital and that the police wanted them to stay home, but he hadn’t told his son that it was because of him that other people were dying. Barton was just trying to comprehend and cope with the fact that someone out there wanted his son dead, and he was just doing his best to protect him. I knew that if it were us and Jack in the same position, I would have done the same thing as Barton.

“Well, I’m not going to send my son to school. I can’t do it. I’m sorry, I know that there are people dying out there because of that decision, but I can’t knowingly send him out there,” Mr. Barton defended.

“We don’t want to send him to school, Mr. Barton. Even if we had you consent to send him, his presence on the campus would only endanger every other student.”

“Why is this happening to us?” Dr. Barton mumbled into his hands as he cleared his face.

“Dr. Barton, whoever is targeting you, they know you. This _is_ personal. They want you to notice them, and until that happens, they’re going to keep killing more people. We need to review everyone you know in order to find out who’s doing this. So, please, before we get started with going through every single name, can you think of anyone with the initials L.C.?”

Dr. Barton let his hands fall from his face before he shook his head.

“All three victims so far were Hispanic men in their late 40’s. Have you had any patients recently that fit that description?”

He shrugged and chuckled, “I’m a trauma surgeon in the D.C. area. I have endless patients, all demographics.”

“Then we’ll start with all of your recent surgeries,” Rossi said. “We’re going to need all of those records.”

“Of course. Anything you need. But, I don’t understand, if he’s mad at me, why not just kill me?”

“We’re not sure yet, Dr. Barton,” Morgan admitted. “But, as soon as we know, you’ll know.”

Just then, a phone started ringing. I reached instinctively for mine before realizing that it was just Mr. Barton’s home phone. I relaxed my shoulders, almost in a disappointed way. Hotch should have called by now. Rossi should have stopped breathing down my neck and let me just go find Hotch. There was no reason to have all six of us present for that interview because I had absolutely nothing to offer while my mind was occupied with other things. Dr. Barton was rightfully concerned about his son, and everyone was all up in arms to help him; but I was worried about Hotch, their friend and boss, and none of them seemed to care. I knew that Hotch and I had a bad track record for worrying too much about each other, but after everything we had been through, could anyone really blame us? Apparently.

“Jeffrey?” Dr. Barton questioned after hearing his son’s voice on the other end of the call. “Where are you?” Morgan was already skipping steps up the staircase behind us to go look in Jeffrey’s bedroom. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

“He’s not up here,” Morgan shouted breathlessly from the upper level.

“He’s at school,” Dr. Barton told us. “Jeffrey—” He paused. “Jeffrey?” He pulled the phone away from his ear to see what happened to the call. His son had hung up on him. “How did this happen?” he asked us.

“He climbed out his bedroom window,” Morgan explained, racing down the steps.

“Stay here with Emily and Reid,” Rossi ordered me before he and JJ followed Morgan to the door.

So now I was being benched. Great. Thanks, Rossi.

Dr. Barton tried to chase after the rest of the team for answers, and to also go with him to collect his son; but they weren't going to get Jeffrey. They were going to watch him and protect him, sure, but they couldn’t take him out of school now that he had appeared there. Whoever wanted to kill Dr. Barton’s son had been watching them, and all he had to do now was wait until Jeffrey was alone to attack. We wouldn’t let that happen, but Dr. Barton _had_ to stay at home with me, Reid, and Emily in order to help us find the Unsub.

“Dr. Barton, we promise that we’ll protect your son, but we need you to stay here with us to help us find who’s doing this,” Emily explained after stepping in front of Dr. Barton before he could get to the door.

I stepped to the side to call Garcia.

“Good morning, sugarplums,” Garcia greeted.

“Hey, love, I need a couple favors.”

“Favors are my specialty.”

“Can you send us every medical record in relation to a trauma surgeon in the D.C. area named Dr. Barton. We need the files of everyone he has operated on in the past six months, at least.”

“That’s hundreds of files.”

“I know. We need them all.”

Garcia sighed, “Since you asked so nicely, you shall receive.”

“Thanks, Garcia. Another thing…” I stepped into another room to make sure I couldn’t be heard. “Can you track Hotch’s cell phone for me real quick?”

“Hotch? Isn’t he with you?”

“No… Everyone’s telling me he just accidentally slept in, but I need to know for sure since Rossi won’t let me go check on him.”

“Alright, give me on second…” she drifted her words as she started to focus. I could hear her typing in the background for a brief moment before she stopped. “It looks like he’s home. Do you want me to give him a call for you?”

“Please. Thank you, Garcia.”

“No worries, buttercup. I’ll email all of those files you need, and you guys can print them out yourselves.”

“You’re an angel.”

“I know,” she giggled before hanging up abruptly.

So Hotch was at home. That was one worry off of my list, I supposed. He was at home, which meant that he was safe. Maybe everyone was right this whole time about him just being in bed, and that I was overreacting. We had a case to work on, and Hotch sleeping at home wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I knew in the back of my mind that if the roles were reversed, Hotch would be trying to solve this case as fast as possible so that he could home to me. I just needed to follow the laws of WWAHD? — What Would Aaron Hotchner Do? Aaron Hotchner would be sitting down in the living room with Dr. Barton and going through every bit of evidence to see what we knew about the Unsub. That was step one.

I put my phone away and walked back to the living room where Reid and Emily were sitting with Dr. Barton. “Garcia’s going to send over all of the files for us to print,” I told them. “For now,” I groaned as I sat down on the couch with them, “let’s review what we know.”

I picked up the letter that had been sent to Dr. Barton at his office two days ago. Spencer had probably already run psycho linguistics on it himself, but I needed to see it for myself. The immediate and obvious conclusion was that the Unsub was male. The message was very simple and dumbed down— more direct, if you will. Women liked to be more ostentatious with their wording, but men liked to get right to the point. The fact that the first sentence got right to the point of “I’m going to kill your son” rather than something along the lines of “You have hurt me in this or that way, and so because of that, I’m going to kill your son”, it was a telltale sign that we were dealing with a man. Only one man, at that, too. The use of “I” repetitively compared to a “we” or avoiding any pronouns altogether, meant that we were right about this being some kind of personal vendetta between the Unsub and Dr. Barton.

Step two of WWAHD? was next. Hotch always wanted our opinions on everything, even if he had already come to the conclusions himself. Reid had been sitting down and looking at all of this evidence much longer than either Emily or I had, so I decided that he was going to be my guinea pig.

“What do you know about this guy?” I asked Reid.

“He’s specifically targeting Jeffrey rather than Dr. Barton himself, which leads me to believe that our Unsub is a father himself— perhaps he even lost his son in some way, and he wants Dr. Barton to lose his son, as well. He has spent time watching the Bartons, which means that he is likely unemployed— which, if it happened recently, could be a possible stressor.”

Emily stood to leave as her phone pinged with all of the files from Garcia.

“The only thing I can’t figure out, though,” Reid continued, “is why he’s specifically targeting forty-year-old Hispanic males.”

“Maybe that’s what he is, and he’s lashing out against himself vicariously?” I questioned.

“No… If that were the case, he would have just killed Dr. Barton and Jeffrey immediately, then killed himself. He wouldn’t be taunting for attention like this.”

“So, we’ve narrowed down hundreds of cases to, _maybe_ , a few hundred? How are we supposed to go through all of this in the next five hours?” Dr. Barton asked us. “Even with the four of us looking, it’s going to take too long. We need a better plan!”

“Dr. Barton’s right,” I spoke up.

We didn’t have enough manpower, he was right about that; but I saw a window of opportunity with that remark to tell them that if I found Hotch, he could help us out, and that was convincing enough for Dr. Barton. He didn’t need to know who Hotch was or why I needed to find him, he only cared that there was someone else out there who could lend a hand. So before Emily could come back to stop me or Reid could argue that I should stay, I jumped up from the couch and hurried out of the house.

* * *

As I pulled up to our house, I spotted Hotch’s car still sitting in the driveway. I parked just behind it, then headed over to peek into the windows, just to make sure that there wasn’t anything suspicious inside. Maybe he left his phone in the car when he got home because he was that tired? No. Nothing out of the ordinary in the car, so I walked up the brick path in front of the house, jogged up the three steps in front of the door, and pulled out my key to unlock it. As I pushed the key into the lock, the door opened up with ease without me even having turned the key. I froze for a moment before quickly pulling out my gun. I carefully pushed the door open a little further to take a look at the door frame to see if anything was broken. No clear sign of forced entry. Maybe Hotch just forgot to close the door behind him, but I couldn’t be too careful. I had seen enough crime scenes of dumb, naive people who walked into their open homes, thinking that it was safe, and they ended up a murder victim. I wasn’t going to take the same chance.

I pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the house with my gun raised. Hotch’s keys and the stack of mail that had collected in our mailbox since the beginning of the Canada case were resting on the table by the front door. So Hotch had come home, locked up the car after getting out, grabbed the mail, unlocked the door, put the keys and mail down, then what?

I closed the door behind me and locked it to make sure that if someone were in the house with me, they wouldn’t have a clear shot of running out if I found them. I looked to the living room on the left. Hotch’s suitcase was on the couch, which wasn’t unusual if he was extremely tired, so I took a few steps further into the living room and checked around the back of the couch. The bar cart that was pressed against the back of the couch was missing one of the decanters, and I soon found out why when I looked down at the floor. There was glass on the floor, just a few steps away from the bar cart. It didn’t look like the decanter had been dropped, more like thrown. Just beside the broken glass, there was a pool of blood. I cringed slightly as my heart jumped in my chest when I looked back up from the floor to find a bullet hole in the wall.

Someone had been there. The bullet hole was the size of a shotgun blast, not a pistol, which meant that it couldn’t have been Hotch who shot the wall. The big question, though, was who did the blood belong to? Hotch or someone else? There were no drag marks on the ground, no trails of blood. If it was Hotch, he would have tried to get up off the ground and head to another room like the kitchen to grab a knife or the dining room to grab the house phone. So no sign of a struggle besides the glass on the floor. Had someone snuck up on Hotch and he threw the bottle at them so that he could get away, and that was how the blood got there? No, there wasn’t any blood on the glass.

None of it made sense. Nothing in the living room pointed to who had been bleeding, and nothing pointed to where Hotch was. So I had to keep moving. I went through the kitchen first. All of the knives were still there, the dishwasher was beeping to let us know that it was clean, but nothing else seemed noticeable. In the dining room, everything was just as we had left it before leaving for Canada. The phone was on the side table, the faux flowers were in the center of the dining table, and all of the expensive china was still in the case on display. So we hadn’t been robbed.

I moved up the stairs that were in the hallway just past the dining room. No scuff marks anywhere on the walls or the floor. Mine and Hotch’s office was clear. He wasn’t sitting at his desk, and mine looked identical to how I remembered leaving it. No one had been in there. Jack’s room was the same, but I made sure to check the closet, just in case someone was hiding in there, but there was nothing. The last place to look was mine and Hotch’s room at the end of the wall. I proceeded with caution, careful to avoid the spots on the floor that had a tendency to creak. The bed was empty and made, like no one had even laid down in it, which crossed out the chance that Hotch had been asleep this whole time.

Shit.

Hotch’s phone wasn’t on the bedside table, either, which was where he liked to keep it when he went to sleep. I pulled the drawer open to find that his credentials and gun were also missing. He hadn’t come upstairs. He was never up there. Something happened in the living room. Something happened to Hotch. I had been telling everyone all day that I was worried of this very thing, and they all told me it wasn’t a big deal. I knew that Hotch wouldn’t just ignore our calls. I knew it and no one listened. How could they not listen?

The last place to check was the closet. Maybe if Hotch had come home and something happened, and he was looking for a place to hide, he could’ve gone into our closet, right? But there was nothing in there, just like everywhere else. No sign of Hotch and no sign of what actually happened. The _only_ thing out of place on the upper floor was the fact that Hotch’s underwear drawer was wide open. Hotch was a neat freak when it came to the house. He hated it when drawers were left open, or if lights were on for too long, or if the thermostat was set to a different temperature than how he had set it himself. He _never_ kept his drawers open. Ever. I think he would have rather died than left a drawer open. And there were plenty of times where he had even yelled at me for the habit of not closing my drawers.

I holstered my weapon and sat on the edge of the bed. 

What happened? I guessed that the living room scene could have been easy enough to figure out for myself if I went back down to investigate, but the drawer was throwing me for a loop. It was clear to me that Hotch hadn’t once come upstairs after getting home. There was no proof that he had except for the drawer, but why leave it open? Was he trying to tell me something happened? As if the crime scene downstairs didn’t make it obvious enough. Was he looking for something? In his underwear drawer, of all places? No. That obviously didn’t make sense. 

I pulled my phone out and called Garcia.

“Hey, I sent over all of the files, did you get them?” she asked me before I could even open my mouth.

“Uh, I don’t know, I’m not with Emily and Reid right now. I came back to my house to check on Hotch, but he’s not here…. Garcia, something happened…”

“What do you mean?” she asked with worry.

“I— I don’t know. There’s blood and broken glass in the living room, but no body and no sign of a struggle. The only other thing that’s out of place, Garcia, is his underwear drawer in our bedroom. That’s it. I can’t figure out what happened here.”

“His… underwear drawer?”

“It’s wide open and it looks like someone had been looking for something in there. Garcia— There’s blood downstairs and a shotgun sized bullet hole in our wall, and I don't know where Hotch is. I need you to send a forensics team down here ASAP.” I took in a breath as I finally faced the truth, “I think someone took him.”

“Wha— Are you sure? Oh, my god— I… I’m sending a whole army right now—”

“Garcia,” I cooed calmly. I knew that if she freaked out, I would freak out. She just needed to keep her shit together long enough for me to finish talking to her. “I’m going to call Emily and Reid because they’re expecting me back, but you can’t tell the others. They need to keep working on the Barton case.”

“Okay,” she answered before hanging up.

I started dialing Emily’s number. The phone rang three times before she picked up. “Hotch is missing,” I told her immediately. “There’s blood downstairs, and he’s gone.”

“What are you talking about?” she questioned.

“Hotch— He’s gone, Emily. Garcia’s sending a forensics team to look at the crime scene. I’m going to stay here to help find him, but you and Reid should stay with Dr. Barton to look through all of the records.”

“No, no, no. Reid can handle it. We’ve narrowed it down to less than a hundred, they don’t need me right now. I’ll be at your place in a few minutes.”

“Emily—”

“It’s going to be alright.”

That was the first time anyone had told me that. All morning, people _lied_ to tell me that things would be okay just to make sure I wouldn't get distracted from the case, but Emily actually meant it and was trying to be helpful. That meant all the difference.

“Walk me through everything. Tell me what you think could have happened,” she told me. I could hear another car starting up on her end of the call as she started driving to our house.

I nodded to myself and carried my phone back downstairs to the living room to get another look at everything. “Okay, so if I were Hotch…” I started at the front door. “I came home, and I grabbed the mail before coming inside. I dropped my keys and the mail on the table before turning around to lock the door and turn off the alarm.” I checked the alarm log quickly. Hotch had gotten home about fifteen minutes after leaving work, which was normal. Before that, though, the alarm had been on the entire time we were off in Canada. No one else had turned it off before Hotch. “I walk over into the living room and drop my briefcase on the couch,” I reenacted Hotch’s movements while telling Emily. “I’m tired, but that case was long, and I’m waiting up for Y/N to come home, even though they told me not to. I decide to pour myself a drink to help forget and pass the time.” I went back to the bar cart and stood right in front of it like Hotch would have. My back was to the hallway that led to the dining room and the back door of the house. Anyone could have snuck up behind me. I looked up from the bar cart and looked out the window. “It was still dark, so I would have seen my reflection, and if someone was trying to sneak up behind me, I would have seen them, too— so I turned around and threw the decanter at the Unsub to give myself a chance to run. The Unsub fired his weapon, missing Hotch, and instead hitting the wall.” There was no blood around the hole, which meant that it hadn’t touched Hotch at all. “Since it was a shotgun, he would have needed time to reload, time which he didn’t have if he was going to catch up to me while I was trying to run away.” I looked down at the pool of blood on the floor. “Maybe the Unsub hit Hotch’s head with the butt of the gun?” No, there was too much blood for that. “If I can’t shoot someone and I need to quickly kill them, the next best thing is what I could have on me already: a Swiss Army knife, maybe— or, really, any kind of knife.” That was why there was so much blood. _If_ it was Hotch who had been stabbed, then he had been bleeding out on the floor, hence why there was no trail of blood. But why wasn’t he still there?

“Maybe he was wrapped in something?” Emily offered up.

I shook my head, “No. The carpets are all still here.”

“Okay. Well, the techs are on their way. If the Unsub brought anything with him to wrap Hotch in, they’ll find traces of it.”

Just then, sirens and lights approached the road outside of our house. I went to the window and saw three different trucks pull up. One team of investigators, one team for forensics, and one team to start a search in the area to see if Hotch had run away or been dumped somewhere close by. As I invited them all inside and they got to work, I watched them turn my home into a crime scene. They put markers around the blood, the gunshot, and the glass. I told the forensics team to check the stairs and the bedroom for any small traces of blood, or any fingerprints that didn’t belong to anyone in our family.

It felt so… weird… I never thought that in a million years my house would become the very thing Hotch and I feared most. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. We were the ones who stopped crime. We didn’t know how to be the victims of one. Not like this, at least.

Emily pulled up to the house and met me in the doorway. She looked like she was about to hug me, but I dodged it to show her inside. I didn’t do it to be rude but because my focus wasn’t on finding comfort for myself, it was on finding Hotch. Emily being worried about me was just a distraction that we didn’t have time for.

“I have to ask you questions,” Emily told me.

I understood why. If this were any other case, we would have immediately sat down with the family to get a sense of who the victim was and why someone would want to hurt them. If we were going to find Hotch, we needed to go about it like every other case because that system was practically flawless. So I sat down on the couch with Emily while the forensics team searched the rest of the house.

“Was Hotch in any rush to get home?” she asked. I shook my head. The whole team was there when we said goodbye, but we _had_ to run through every question imaginable. “He didn’t seem eager to get here for something?”

“I wanted him to get some sleep because he hasn’t slept since we left for the Canada case, and we’re supposed to go to Jack’s soccer game at 3. I just wanted to make sure that he was well rested for Jack. But, no, there wasn’t anything that he _had_ to hurry home for.”

“Does Hotch like to drink a lot when he gets home?”

“No. He likes to drink if there’s a special occasion or if there’s a really bad case that he needs to forget about… But he doesn’t drink often, and he doesn’t really like to get drunk.”

I knew why she had asked that. At a first glance, with the broken decanter, it just looked like Hotch might have accidentally dropped it and cut his hand while trying to pick up the glass. But there was far too much blood for that to be true— not to mention the huge ass hole in our wall now. Even if it were the case that Hotch broke the decanter, Hotch didn’t get stupid when he was drunk. Emily asked me what I meant by that, and I had to tell her the truth. Hotch got _handsy_ when he was drunk, but never stupid. He wouldn’t have tried to pick up the glass with his hands, or whatever one could possibly hypothesize about that. Someone had broken into our house and done this to Hotch.

“Agent Greenaway,” Anderson came into the living room after coming down from upstairs, “Garcia told us that Agent Hotchner’s phone had been tracked here, but we can’t find it. Do you have it?”

I shook my head, “I couldn’t find his phone, nor his gun or badge.”

“We found his gun and badge. They had been dumped into the trash in the kitchen.”

I cocked a brow and grabbed my phone again to call Hotch. How did it say that his phone was in the house, but we couldn’t fucking find it? That made no sense. I pressed Hotch’s contact and waited for the phone to ring. I jumped in my own skin as the ringer went off right beneath us, just under the couch. Anderson crouched down behind the couch and grabbed the phone as it was still ringing.

“Well, that crosses off the chance that it was on vibrate,” I said, annoyed. Everyone had kept telling me that he couldn’t hear it because the ringer was off, but I knew that Hotch always had it on the highest volume— especially since New York because his hearing still wasn’t 100% yet.

My phone started ringing and the screen lit up with Garcia’s name. I answered the call. “Did you find him?”

“Maybe,” she responded. “I called nearly every hospital within a fifty mile radius of your house to see if any of them had an Agent Aaron Hotchner—”

“—I’m his emergency contact, they would have called me first. And they found his credentials here, they wouldn’t know—”

“I know, I know. That’s why this is weird. Just listen. Someone dropped a John Doe off at St. Sebastian Hospital, and the someone who dropped him off was FBI Agent Derek Morgan.”

My heart sank. Morgan was at the school still with Jeffrey and the team. He didn’t have anything to do with this. Even if he did, he would have called me about it as soon as he could. So who would possibly impersonate Morgan?

My heart wrenched in my chest and I looked up at Emily. “George Foyet did this. The Reaper took Morgan’s credentials the night he was attacked. He’s the only one who would have had Morgan’s badge.” Emily and I were both up on our feet. “Garcia, which hospital did you say this was at?”

“St. Sebastian.”

We ran out to the car Emily had driven there. Emily jumped into the driver’s seat and I jumped into the passenger’s. I thanked Garcia for her help and told her again to not tell anyone else about this. They would know after this case, and I’d call her with an update once we would get to the hospital. She told us to be safe and that my secret was safe with her before I hung up.

At the hospital, Emily and I raced up to the front desk and asked where the recently admitted John Doe was after flashing our badges in the nurse’s face. She told us that he was in room 352 on the third floor. Emily was the one who thanked the nurse because I was already at the elevator, impatiently pressing the “up” button. I looked at the digital screen just above the elevator to see which floor it was coming from, and it said the sixth floor, and it wasn’t moving yet. I cursed under my breath. I could run up the staircase and be there faster than just waiting around for the elevator, so that was exactly what I did. Emily called after me, trying to keep up as I skipped step, but I didn’t stop or slow down.

When we reached the third floor, I pulled the door open and ran into the hallway to find a floor directory right in front of me. I approached quickly and used my finger to skim all of the floor plan for room 352. I turned to the right and started hauling ass towards the room.

  1. 346\. 347. 348. 349. 350. 351. 352.



I came to a screeching halt, catching myself on the door frame to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally run past, and I took a look into the room. There was a nurse standing next to the patient on the bed, taking notes on all of his vitals. He was hooked up to an oxygen machine, a heart rate monitor, three different IVs, a catheter, and a blood bag. I stepped into the room to get a better look, and the nurse stopped taking her notes to acknowledge me.

“You can’t be in here,” she insisted.

“That’s my boyfriend,” I told her, hurrying over to Hotch’s other side after noticing that it really was him. He was out of it, but he was still breathing. “What happened?” I took his hand in mine.

“Ma’am, I'm going to have to ask you to step outside. This room is for family only.”

I pulled my credentials out and showed them to her while still watching Hotch. “What happened to him?” I repeated.

She sighed as I put my ID away. “He was stabbed nine times, but none of them hit any major artery.” So I had been right about the knife. “Honestly, it’s a miracle he’s even alive. He lost a lot of blood. I don’t think he'd still be alive if it weren’t for that other agent.”

I looked at her. She meant Foyet, posing as Derek. “Is the other agent still here?” She shook her head. “When is he going to wake up?”

“The anesthesia should wear off in a few minutes here. He’ll be awake, but he’ll be out of it for a while. I suggest you grab a seat if you’re going to wait for him to regain consciousness.”

I took the nurse’s advice as she put down Hotch’s medical chart and left the room. Emily traded places with her in the door. I asked her why she had taken so long to follow me in, and she told me that Anderson called to say that they were done checking the house. There were no fingerprints, the only blood in the house was Hotch’s, and they still couldn’t figure out either why Hotch’s underwear drawer was open. I asked if there was any good news, and she only shook her head as she took the other seat in the room across from me.

“Anderson says that they’re taking Hotch’s badge and gun to the office. He said that Hotch’s day planner wasn’t in his briefcase, but it was on the table by the front door, under all of the mail. Is that a usual spot for it?”

I shook my head. “Hotch carries it everywhere. All of our schedules are in there, and all of Hotch’s contacts are in there.” I looked up at her with wide eyes, “Was it open?” She shook her head. So then why the hell was it there? Honestly, my best guess was that Hotch might have grabbed it to take a look at when Jack’s game was and forgot to put it back before he grabbed a drink. We wouldn’t know until Hotch would wake up. “I was supposed to go home with him,” I whispered to her like it was some huge secret that I was ashamed of admitting. “We were supposed to go home together, but I wanted to stay at the office to do work… Who does that? I could have just taken my work home with me.”

“You can’t do that to yourself, Y/N. You can’t change the past, so it’s not worth asking yourself what would have happened if you went home with him. You shouldn’t blame yourself for something you couldn’t control.”

“But I am… I have to blame myself. He wouldn’t be here if there were two of us against Foyet.”

“You don’t know that. He could have tried to kill you, too.” Emily reached over for Hotch’s medical sheet to see if she could find any good news about him to lift my spirits. “Wait…” she furrowed her brows after she spotted something.

I perked up with worry, “What? What is it?” I squeezed Hotch’s hand unconsciously.

“L.C. Look, it says L.C. on here,” she showed me the sheet. Right above Hotch’s name, in bright red ink, were the same two letters that were connected to the Barton investigation. Emily jumped out of her seat, “I’m going to go ask the nurse what this means.”

I watched her leave until she turned the corner. When we were alone, I turned back to Hotch. With my free hand, I brushed his hair back gently so that I could see his face. He looked so peaceful, like he hadn’t just been attacked by the Reaper in our own home. He didn’t look like he was in pain, which was a relief of some kind. As I cupped his cheek with my palm, I brought his knuckles up to my mouth and kissed them gingerly. For the first time all day, a silent tear fell down my cheek. I tried to smile for him, to keep the brave face I knew he would have for me if the roles were switched. He would want me to wake up to his smiling face to make sure I wouldn’t freak out, and I knew that I had to do the same for him now.

Emily came running back in, “We’ve got a problem.”

I looked back up at her, “What is it?”

“L.C. stands for ‘Living Children’. It’s used in hospitals when they aren’t sure if the patient will have to be put on life support. As I was calling Reid to tell him, Dr. Barton ran out of the house, and next thing I hear is a gunshot.”

“Oh, my god… Emily, you should go.”

“There’s no point. I already called 911 and Rossi, they’ll all get there before me.”

“You have to get there. If they notice that we’re gone, Spencer’s going to have to tell them the truth.”

“They’re probably already there…” she admitted.

Shit. I supposed that they were going to find out soon enough, anyhow. Now it was only a matter of minutes before I’d get a call from Rossi, yelling at me for not listening to orders, or a call from Morgan about me not keeping him in the loop. I knew it was coming, it was just down to when and who would call first.

Ten more minutes passed of sitting in the hospital room with Emily, waiting for a call or for Hotch to wake. Nothing was happening, and counting the minutes certainly wasn’t helping my anxiety. I knew that Emily meant no harm by telling me about what L.C. meant— in fact, she was trying to help by giving another piece of the puzzle towards the Barton investigation. But when she told me that the letters were for patients who were under coma watch… They put that on Hotch’s sheet for a reason. The nurse had told me that he was going to wake up soon, but soon wasn’t coming fast enough, and every minute that he didn’t wake up was another minute of the letters L.C. staring at me.

And then the dreaded phone call came. I exchanged a glance with Emily after seeing that it was Morgan who was calling me. She silently nodded an encouragement, and I answered.

“Why the hell did you not call me when you found out?” Morgan ranted on the other end of the call before my finger was even off the answer button.

“You guys needed to focus on the case. Is Reid okay?”

“The Unsub shot him in the leg, but he’s going to be fine. We’re driving to the hospital behind the ambulance now. We’re about five minutes out.”

My breath shook as I inhaled sharply. “He’s okay,” I told Emily. “He’s…” I sniffled. “He’s okay.”

Morgan was silent for a moment. I could tell that his anger was turning into worry, so he was giving me a second to compose myself. Then, he finally asked, “Is Hotch okay?”

I sniffled again and shook my head, though he couldn’t see me. My silence was answer enough. I knew that if I tried to answer him, I was going to break down, and I couldn’t do that. Not now. Not when Hotch needed me to be strong. So, I hung up on Morgan before anything else could be said. Emily was quiet; however, I could tell that there was something important on the tip of her tongue—something she wanted to console me with, but I wasn’t listening to anything. I was just staring at Hotch’s blank, resting face. He wasn’t okay. I wanted to believe that he was, and I wanted to listen to everyone when they would tell me that he’d be alright, but I was looking at him, and some part of my soul knew that he was never going to be okay again. Some piece of me knew that this was just the beginning.

And then the team showed up five minutes later, just as Morgan promised. Emily welcomed them into the room, but I didn’t budge. I was still at Hotch’s side. I was intent on watching him until he would wake up. It didn’t matter if it would be another few seconds or hours or days, I was going to be there, waiting. And the wait wasn’t going to be patient. At some point, I was going to start shaking him awake or threatening to leave him just to get him to crack a smile. Some part of me wished that he really were just playing pretend. I was praying that he was really awake, but he was keeping his eyes closed in order to trick me, and at any moment he would wake up and tell me that this was all some kind of sick joke.

Another few minutes passed as Rossi and Morgan talked with Emily quietly in the corner. That was when I noticed Hotch twitch and shuffle in his hospital bed. My face softened and I reached out to hold him. “Hey…” I cooed with a smile. Hotch’s eyes started fluttering open and my grip around his hand tightened as my heart swelled.

Hotch swallowed hard, trying to lubricate his dry throat after sleeping with his mouth open for so long. “Where am I?” he whispered.

“You’re in the hospital.”

His thumb drew a circle over one of my knuckles. “How did I get here?”

“Foyet drove you. Do you remember what happened?”

He nodded, “I had just gotten home… He snuck up behind me and pointed his gun at me and told me to turn around. He told me that I should have taken his deal… Then he shot the wall to try and scare me, but when it didn’t work and he was busy reloading, I tried to tackle him, but he saw it coming and he threw me onto the ground…” His heart rate started to pick up. I quietly hushed him and inched closer to the edge of my seat. “I tried to call you,” he admitted, “but he kicked my phone under the couch before I could.” His eyes screwed shut and he winced as he adjusted his body in the bed. “He stabbed me twice before my phone started ringing… He said something about you that I couldn’t hear…” he choked back a cry before it could escape him. He took a moment to collect himself before continuing, “He stabbed me five more times before burying it here,” he pointed to the left side of his abdomen. “He said he was going to look for something and then he left for a few minutes. When he came back, he buried it in my chest one more time,” he pointed to his right side, a few inches above his hip. “That’s when I passed out.”

Foyet had tortured Hotch. That was his style, we all knew it, but this was different. It was more intimate. Foyet wanted Hotch to stay alive for as long as possible to ensure maximum pain, but because Hotch passed out early and Foyet wasn’t done with him yet, so he dropped him off at the hospital to make sure he wouldn’t die.

“I’m going to kill him,” I whispered, tucking my head into Hotch’s shoulder.

“What did he take from us?” Hotch asked as Emily and the rest of the team stepped back into the room.

“The only things that looked out of place were your day planner, and Y/N said that your underwear drawer shouldn’t have been open,” Emily responded.

“My underwear drawer— It was open?” he asked nervously.

Emily nodded. “Yeah. Why?”

“My day planner. Was anything missing or erased?”

“Anderson examined it himself. He said that there was only one page missing, and it was from the contacts section, specifically the page of names starting with B.”

He let go of my hand and desperately started looking around for something. “Where are my clothes?”

I sat upright and grabbed the bag of personal belongings sitting on the table to my right. He opened the bag urgently and pulled out his suit jacket that was covered in blood. I wondered what he was looking for as he reached into one of the inside pockets to retrieve something. He tossed the jacket to the side of the bed as he held a folded piece of paper in his hands. I watched intently as he slowly unfolded it.

My breath hitched and Hotch let out a quiet sob as we saw what Foyet had left for him. Hotch had multiple photos of Haley and Jack around the house, even still when I moved in, but there was one that he kept on his desk of the three of them just after Jack was born. When I was searching the house, I didn’t even realize that it was gone. I didn’t think to see if Foyet had taken any photos.

Hotch handed me the photo. “Haley’s maiden name is Brooks.”

“He stole the B page…” I whispered at the realization. “He knows where they are.” I looked at the clock over the door. “Jack’s getting out of school in ten minutes.”

Hotch took my hand again. “I was hiding something in my underwear drawer. Something important.”

“What was it?” I inquired. He stared into my eyes for a moment, debating on whether or not he wanted to give up the secret. “Aaron, what was it?”

“I was hiding an engagement ring in there. I bought it shortly after we drove home from Cincinnati. I was going to propose after Dallas, but I got too chicken shit.”

“Aaron…”

He looked at Rossi. “He knows where my family is, and he has something to give to his next victim. You have to find them. Please.”

“Morgan,” I said, kicking my chair back. He nodded understandingly and left the room to go call a SWAT team. “I’ll get them,” I told Hotch. “I promise. I love you.”

“I love you,” he told me as I pushed past Rossi and JJ.

The whole team hurried out of the hospital, except for Emily, who promised to keep an eye on Hotch for me. Morgan and I were up front, Rossi and JJ in the back. The hospital was about seventeen minutes away from Haley’s house. Jack was already out of school, which meant that they were probably only just getting home. I tried calling Haley’s cellphone, but she didn’t pick up, so I tried her house phone, but that didn’t work either. Perhaps Foyet had already gotten to them...

As Morgan sped down the highway, Rossi handed me and JJ our vests. Morgan was still on the phone with Garcia who was updating us on the SWAT team’s arrival time. They were only a few minutes ahead of us, but Morgan told them to wait. I wanted to be the first in, just in case Foyet already had them. He wanted Hotch to hurt, right? Well, he’d win if he had me, Jack, and Haley all together. If I went in, I could try talking to him, or at least distract him with the idea of killing me first long enough for Morgan to find another way into the house.

The SWAT team was already waiting outside when we arrived. Morgan was putting on his vest as we all ran up to the house. We knew that we had to be quiet if we wanted to surprise Foyet, so I checked the door first to see if it was unlocked, which it was. The head of the SWAT team asked over the comms if his team was in position, and he heard back that they were ready to go. I elbowed the glass window on the door, breaking it, then reaching through to unlock the door. I pulled my arm back out carefully before pushing the door in quietly. The SWAT team leader told the other units to move in, too.

Morgan had my back as we pushed into the living room, which was empty. Then to the dining room, also empty. JJ’s unit met with us in there after checking the kitchen, and Rossi’s unit met up with us after clearing the basement.

“Jack’s room is to the right; Haley’s is to the left. There’s a bathroom between them,” I whispered as we all collected in front of the staircase.

Two men from the SWAT team went first up the stairs, then our team moved in behind them. At the top of the steps, they split up. Morgan and I moved to the left, towards Haley’s room, while JJ and Rossi went to the right to look in Jack’s room and the bathroom. The SWAT agent who was with us waited for Morgan’s signal, which ended up being Morgan kicking the door in with his foot. The three of us pushed into the room with our weapons raised.

Haley jumped out of her own skin when we busted into the room suddenly. She screamed, threw the laundry she was doing onto the bed, and ripped out her headphones. “Oh, my god!” she shouted, trying to calm herself down when she saw that it was just me and Morgan. “What are you doing!”

Morgan continued further into the room to go look in the closet and master bedroom’s bathroom. I holstered my weapon and approached Haley. “Where’s Jack, Haley?”

“What are you doing here?” she asked again with a hand over her racing heart.

“Aaron was attacked. He’s okay, but he’s in the hospital. We think that someone is looking for you and Jack. Where is he, Haley?”

“He’s at a friend’s house for a playdate before his game.”

“Whose house is he at?”

“Uh…” she thought hard for a second, “Ryan’s. Ryan Locke’s house.”

“That’s five minutes from here,” I told Morgan, both of us already heading back towards the door. JJ exchanged places with us.

“Y/N, what happened to Aaron!” Haley called after me.

“JJ will explain everything!” I yelled back, jumping back down the steps with Morgan right behind me. “Keys,” I told Morgan as we ran to the car. He threw them at me just before I slid into the driver’s seat. I turned the sirens and lights back on and started driving off towards Ryan Locke’s house. “I’ll go up to the house and get him, you stay here, okay? Don’t…” My breath shuttered. “Don’t tell him about Hotch yet. Haley should be the one to explain.” Morgan nodded in agreement. “Just act like everything’s okay.”

“You _do know_ everything’s going to be okay, right?”

I sucked in a deep breath and nodded, even though I wasn’t entirely convinced. Hotch had been through a lot. Too much. Since New York, it just felt like he kept getting knocked down and couldn’t catch a break. Every time we thought that things were going to be okay, they just ended up going to shit again. We got lucky with New York. It could have been him who died that night and not Kate. But this thing with Foyet… He had clearly been stalking us. How else would he have known about the ring and the family photo? He told Hotch that he was going to look for something, and in that time, he knew exactly where to find the ring Hotch had been hiding, grabbed the photo of Jack and Haley from his desk, and tore out Haley’s address from Hotch’s day planner. He knew what he was doing. He had planned this. And we didn’t see it coming.

A few houses down from Ryan Locke’s house, I slowed down, turned off the lights and sirens, then drove calmly into the driveway. I kept the car running as I got out, leaving Morgan behind. I looked around the house and the street to see if there was anyone watching me or the house. Specifically, I was looking for Foyet hiding in a car or behind a tree or something— anything.

I rang the doorbell then turned back to the road to take another look as I waited for Ryan’s mom to open the door. When I heard the lock click, I faced the door again.

“Hello?” Ryan’s mom welcomed cautiously.

“Hi, Mrs. Locke. I’m Y/N— I don’t know if you remember me… I’m dating Aaron...”

I paused to see if my name or face would ring a bell. She took a moment to put the pieces together, but when she did recognize me, her face lit up. “Oh, right! Yes, of course. I’ve seen you and Aaron at some of the boys’ soccer games.”

“Yeah,” I smiled. “Listen, I know that Jack just got here for his playdate with Ryan, but something came up, and I need to take him home.”

“Is everything alright?”

“It’s fine,” I lied, “I just need to take him.”

“Will you guys be at the game?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh…”

I nodded, my eyes trying to search what I could see of the house from where I was standing. “Do you mind asking him to grab his things and meet me out here?”

“Oh!” she giggled. “How silly of me. One second.” She closed the door about half way before leaving to go grab Jack for me. I waited again, watching the road. Morgan was still in the car, watching me to make sure no one would come up and get me when my back was turned. “Do you have everything?” I heard Ryan’s mom ask from inside, followed by Jack’s response.

I forced a smile onto my face as I could see Jack running towards the door with his backpack bouncing around on his back. “Hey, little man!” I cheered, crouching down. Jack’s arms were wide open, and I caught him in a hug. I groaned as I stood up with him in my arms. “Did you grow while your dad and I were away?”

He nodded, “I’m almost as tall as you.”

I giggled, “You sure are.”

“Can we get some ice cream?”

“No, we gotta go see your mom at home.” I looked around Jack to thank Ryan’s mother before she closed the door and I started carrying Jack to the car. “Uncle Derek came with me, are you excited to see him?”

Jack nodded as I put him down and opened the back car door for him. He stepped up and climbed in, and I helped him put his seat belt on after he put his bag on the floor. “Hi, Uncle Derek,” Jack greeted. “Can you turn the police lights on?”

Morgan looked over his shoulder and at me, “That’s up to Y/N.”

I squinted at him. He wanted to be the cool uncle, so he didn’t want to have to turn down Jack. He was hoping that I would, but what he forgot was that I was the one who liked to spoil Jack, and Hotch absolutely hated it. I wasn’t about to stop now. So I nodded and told Morgan to go for it. His grin fell in an instant, but mine only grew. Morgan turned on the police lights for Jack and I got back into the car. We drove back to Haley’s house at the speed limit, stopping for every sign and light, and slowing down for any kids in the neighborhood who were playing in the street. 

The SWAT team was already gone when we arrived back at the house, which was nice for not worrying Jack in any way. He grabbed his backpack from the floor, unbuckled himself, and ran inside. Morgan popped his door open like he was about to step out, but I didn’t move. I just sat still, staring straight ahead, lost in thought. I knew what was coming. I knew that Rossi had already called in a favor at Witness Protection. I knew that Foyet was out there, looking for the right time to take Haley and Jack away from Hotch, and this was the right thing to do in order to protect them. But I also knew that it would hurt like hell. I knew that it would be painful to live every day not knowing where Jack was, what he was doing, if he was happy or if he was in trouble. For all I knew, that day could have very well been the last day I would ever see him again…

“Y/N,” Morgan cooed worriedly, closing his car door again. He reached over and peeled one of my hands away from the wheel so that he could hold me. I could tell that his eyes were searching my face for a profile, and I knew that I should’ve met his gaze, yet I still couldn’t move. “It’s going to be alright.”

I sucked in a breath, trying to hold back the tears I felt welling up in my eyes. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this, Morgan…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hotch keeps winding up in the hospital, and I keep worrying about Jack to the point I can’t even breathe—” My eyes finally met his as I turned my head to the side. “What am I supposed to do without him?”

Morgan squeezed my hand, a signal to look right into his eyes as he told me something I needed to believe. “You need to do what you need to do.”

What the hell did that even mean? I felt so helpless with the position I was given in all of this. I couldn’t find Foyet, I couldn’t save Hotch, I couldn’t stop Haley and Jack from leaving, I couldn’t protect the people who meant the most to me. I needed answers. I needed someone to tell me how to fix this mess, but no one seemed to know more than me. Morgan wanted to comfort me however he could, but the only way that would matter was the only way he fell short.

“I feel like I could break at any moment… But how am I supposed to do that when I need to put on a smile for the three of them? How am I supposed to pretend like everything’s going to be fine when our whole lives are falling apart?”

“By holding onto hope. You take today, and you don’t let it get you down. You use it as fuel for the fire that pushes you to find this son of a bitch and take him down so that you can have them back. That’s how. Hope. For them. Got it?”

I nodded slightly, wiping away the tear that was running down my cheek. “I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.”

“It’s not goodbye,” he shook his head. “It’s just… tell him you’ll see him later. He needs hope, too.”

I looked back at the house to see Haley, JJ, Rossi, and Jack coming out with suitcases, and my heart sank to my stomach. Jack looked so happy still, probably thinking that he was just going on vacation with his mom. I didn’t know how I was possibly going to look into his eyes and tell him “I’ll see you later” while knowing that I might be lying to him. Foyet went unnoticed and underground for decades… He could do it again, just to torture me and Hotch. He could do it, even though the deal was that he would keep killing until we stopped looking for him. We wouldn’t stop, he knew that. He was stealing our family away from us, which meant that we wouldn’t rest until he was away for good and they could come back home to us.

Haley came up to my window and knocked a few times before I started rolling it down. She looked between me and Morgan for a moment before her gaze settled on me. “Aaron’s old friend, Sam Kassemeyer, he works for Witness Protection… He’s going to help us.”

I nodded. “That’s good.”

“He says—”

I stopped her with a raised palm. “I shouldn’t know anything… That’s what’s best for you and Jack.” It killed me to say it because, more than anything, I just wanted to know where they were going, what they were going to do, and if they were going to be happy. I had heard of Sam through Hotch, and I knew that he was good at his job. He would do whatever it would take to protect our family, but rules were rules, therefore I couldn’t know anything… No matter how much it hurt. “None of us should know.”

Haley shifted her weight around on the balls of her feet. “Can you take me and Jack to see Hotch at the hospital first? Sam said he could meet us there so that we can say goodbye.”

My shoulders fell as I hesitated for a beat. “I—” Morgan’s hand squeezed mine again, a silent reassurance that it would be alright. I forced a faux smile onto my face for her sake. “I’d love to.”

She feigned a smile back. “I’ll tell Jack.”

I nodded and watched as she left to go help Rossi and JJ put everything in their car. I rolled the window back up again, and I clutched Morgan’s hand until it started to hurt. “You might need to drive,” I admitted quietly.

“Okay.”

Morgan and I both got out of the car simultaneously, switching seats as Haley and Jack made their way over to our car. JJ and Rossi finished packing up all of Haley and Jack’s necessities in their car, already sitting in the driver and passenger seats, waiting for our signal. Haley helped Jack into the back seat, holding him close to her side as she also got situated.

Morgan focused on getting us to the hospital as fast as possible since their time with Hotch was going to be limited before Sam could come pick them up to take them into protective custody. I had to try and mentally prepare myself for what was about to come. Whatever I was feeling, whatever pain was breaking me down in that moment, Hotch was feeling it tenfold. Jack wasn’t mine; Haley and I were hardly even friends… The pain I felt in response to losing them was probably only a molecule of what Hotch was going through.

When we arrived at the hospital, I led Haley and Jack up to Hotch’s room calmly. Jack brought Red, his toy dinosaur, up with him because it was his good luck charm, and since he was going off on a trip, he needed it for the plane ride. Then, when we got up to the waiting room, Morgan went to go sit with the team so that the rest of us could have privacy.

Haley stepped in my path to stop me in my tracks. “I want to talk to Aaron alone for a bit. Do you mind watching Jack?”

I shook my head. “Of course not. Go for it.” I reached down and lifted Jack into my arms, setting him on my hip as Haley continued on towards Hotch’s hospital room.

Jack started shoving our favorite red dinosaur toy in my face, roaring as he did so. He wanted to play, just like old times, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to pretend like everything was alright when it clearly wasn’t. He probably had no idea what was really going on— which was good— but it also meant that I had to play dumb. Like Morgan said, I couldn’t treat this as a goodbye. I had to treat this like I would see my little man again soon and that playing with him this one last time wasn’t going to break my heart into a million little pieces.

I took the toy from Jack with a smile, using it to attack his cheek like it was eating him alive. Jack giggled, trying to use his green Hot Wheels to fend off the attack. I didn’t relent, though. My hold around Jack stayed true as I ambushed him. I thought to myself how this could have very well been the last time I would get the chance to do this with Jack. When I first met Jack, we immediately connected through our love of this stupid red dinosaur toy, and it became tradition for me to play with him whenever he was bored. Our act was that the dinosaur was attacking him, and his green car always came to save him. The dinosaur always lost, but that was part of the fun, since Jack always got to cheer and run around while claiming victory over the beast that was considered to be invincible.

Every second Jack smiled at me, every fleeting moment where he was laughing in my ear, I stopped to take it all in. I never wanted to forget the sound of his laughter. I never wanted to forget just how bright and contagious his smile was. I never wanted to forget how he would wiggle in my arms as we continued to attack each other with our chosen toys. I never… I choked back a sob before Jack could notice. I never wanted to forget how good it felt to hold him in my arms.

This _was_ a goodbye, though I was the only one between us who knew it. It was a goodbye, and we couldn’t even say it to each other. How was I supposed to live with the fact that I wouldn’t get to say it to him: “Goodbye, little man. I love you more than anything. You gave me purpose. You have given me another reason to stay alive. You have given me another reason to keep going at work. You did that, my little superhero. I love you, Jack. I love you… I love you… I love you…”

“Y/N,” Haley peeked her head out into the hallway.

My train of thought drifted away from me as I bounced Jack on my hip to readjust my hold. I stopped playing with Jack as I carried him towards his dad’s room. Jack took the hint, giving up on our game, resting his head on my shoulder. As I got closer to Haley, I could see that she had been crying while talking to Hotch. I didn’t blame her, of course. Just as our lives were crumbling, hers was, too. By knowing Hotch, and being tied to him through Jack, she kept getting roped into danger that she wanted nothing to do with. She was probably just as sick of it as the rest of us, and, honestly, she was probably upset to be leaving Hotch, too. They weren’t like most divorced couples. They still got along, they still loved and cared for each other, and they still both cared about Jack. Having to leave one another was probably just as hard as leaving Jack, too. But this was necessary. They deserved to be safe, to be happy, and to _live_. If they stayed here, Foyet was going to kill them, Hotch and I had no doubts. This was all for them.

Hotch was sitting upright, trying to find a comfortable way to do so, just to give Jack the impression that he was much better than he really was. After seeing him only a few hours ago after getting out of surgery, I knew that he shouldn’t have been sitting up like that, but what was I supposed to do with Jack there? Morgan told me to put on a smile and to give Jack hope… I needed to just hold on a little longer, to stay as brave as I could for my little man until he was gone.

“Hey, buddy,” Hotch welcomed with a smile. He scooted to the right as I sat down on the side of his hospital bed, setting Jack down on his knees. Hotch looked up at me for a moment, trying to read past my mask of happiness and calmness. “Listen, Jack, you and your mom are going to go on a trip together, and Y/N and I won’t be able to talk to you for a bit–”

“Why?” Jack asked.

Hotch and I exchanged another glance. “You know how Y/N and I go on our superhero adventures all the time?” Jack nodded. “Well, your trip is going to be like that. You get to be your own superhero for a bit. It’s all part of your junior superhero training. Does that sound like fun?” Jack nodded again, this time smiling a bit before it disappeared entirely. “You okay, bud?”

Jack looked up at his dad after looking around the room to see all of the different tubes and wires he was hooked up to. “Are you going to be okay, Dad?”

The only thing I could do to stop myself from breaking into tears then and there was to brush some of Jack’s hair out of his face with my fingers, then kiss the top of his head.

Hotch reached out and petted Jack’s hair after I moved back. “I’m _so_ proud of you, buddy.” He had dodged Jack’s question, not wanting to lie to his son. He wasn’t okay, and he wasn’t going to be okay for a while— especially considering that we wouldn’t get to see him for a very long time. But what Jack didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. “Can you do me a favor?” Jack nodded once more. “Can you give Y/N a Superman hug since I can’t have one?”

Jack turned to me and threw his arms around my neck in an instant. As I pulled him close, I used the opportunity to wipe away my tears before he could see my face. We were both twisted awkwardly since I was still sitting on the bed and he was sitting on his dad’s legs. That didn’t stop Jack, though. Just as he always had, he hugged me as tightly as he could, struggling to do so. I hugged him back, this time a little harder than I ever had before. I wanted to hold him as close as possible for as long as possible. Maybe I could refuse to let go and then I would never have to say goodbye to him. Maybe I could just hold on long enough to convince myself and Hotch that sending them away wasn’t the best option. Maybe I could just have my little man in my arms for a few minutes more.

“I love you, little man,” I whispered to him. “So much.”

“I love you, too.” He squeezed me tighter, managing to push the sob out of my chest before I could catch it. “Why are you crying?”

I realized quickly that it hadn’t been a quiet sob that I could pass off as anything other than being upset that he was leaving. “I’m just going to miss you while you’re away on your trip.”

Jack parted from me slowly, even though I was trying to still hold onto him. “Do you want to look after Red for me?” he asked, holding up the dinosaur for me. “He’ll be safe with you while I’m gone. And then you can give him back when I come home from my mission.”

I wiped my tears away before taking the dinosaur from him. “I’ll protect him with my life. I promise.” I held the dinosaur close to my chest because I couldn’t hold Jack anymore. “Give your dad a hug— just not a Superman one, okay?”

Jack turned back to his dad and carefully leaned forward to hug him. As Hotch’s chin rested on Jack’s shoulder, I watched his face cringe as pain coursed through him. It was probably uncomfortable to move at all, but worse to try to hug someone as they put pressure on his wounded chest. He wanted to hug Jack, though. He didn’t care how much pain he was in, he wanted to hold his son again, one last time.

“Alright, bud,” Hotch sniffled, carefully pushing Jack away. “You’ve got a flight to catch.” He leaned in slightly and kissed Jack’s forehead. “I love you, Jack. More than anything in the world.”

“I love you, too, Dad.” Jack smiled.

Haley approached the bed, coming around to the side I was sitting on. She waited for Hotch to lean back against his pillows again before picking Jack up. Jack hid his face in the crooks of her neck, hugging her neck to make sure he wouldn’t fall out of her arms. Haley looked down at me for a moment, searching for the right thing to say. “Thank you.”

That was what she decided on. I knew what she meant. I knew that there was nothing more to say. She didn’t have to thank me for loving Hotch, for being by his side no matter what, or for loving Jack like he was my own. She didn’t have to say it, but she wanted to because she meant it. I didn’t need her thanks, but to hear it before losing my little man, for what could have been forever, it felt like a relief of some kind.

Before anything else could be said, Haley turned on her heels and carried Jack out. As they walked away, Jack looked up from his mom’s shoulder and waved to me and his dad one last time. I managed to keep my brave face on as I held our favorite dinosaur in one hand and waved back to him with the other.

When they turned the corner, entirely out of view, I dropped my hand and my smile, and looked over at Hotch. Tears were already welling and spilling down my face as Hotch screwed his eyes shut and started crying. I sniffled and wiped my nose with my sleeve, letting a sob fall from my lips. Hotch let out a sigh, trying to not sob any harder than I already was.

“Come here,” he croaked, holding his good arm out for me.

I turned to face him entirely before laying down. Since there was only enough room for him to lay on his back, I was left to lay on my side, curled up under his arm and against his bandaged chest. I finally felt Hotch let out an audible cry as I nuzzled against him, no longer holding back my own tears.

Since that morning, when I walked in to find our house a mess, I had just wanted to break down and sob for hours. Things started off so normal… Morgan and I were just getting breakfast, joking around, and having a good time; all while Hotch was being tortured by Foyet. I wasn’t there when he needed me most. I fucked up and I wasn’t there to save him. And it took me forever to go home to look for him. When I found the blood on the floor, I thought that there was a good chance that Hotch was gone. After everything, especially New York, I thought that I could never be that scared again… But I saw the signs of a struggle and a possible murder, and I thought I lost the love of my life. And then I saw him in this bed, on life support, just out of surgery. It was worse than New York. It was so painful I thought I was going to die.

Hotch tried his hardest to pull me close as another sob finally escaped him. His breathing sputtered, shaking my hold on him slightly. I looked up through my foggy eyes to see that he still had his eyes closed, his lip quivering while he tried to hold everything back.

I squeezed Jack’s toy against my chest, cuddling it as close to me as I was with Hotch. That dinosaur was all we had of Jack now— all that _I_ had of Jack. There was a chance I was never going to hold my little man in my arms again… All I had to hold as a reminder was that toy, squeezing each of the memories out of it. I remembered that first night I finally got to meet Jack. I had shown up to Hotch’s house unexpectedly, unaware that he had Jack for the night. I was so scared to meet Hotch’s son. I thought that maybe Jack wouldn’t like me, or that Haley would hate me and take it out on Hotch by not letting him see his son. I was scared that I would meet Jack and Hotch would suddenly realize that he didn’t want me around anymore. I was petrified, but Jack came over and he asked me to play. He asked me which of his toys was my favorite, and I told him the red dinosaur. I remembered it like it was yesterday, the way he looked up at me with a smile and said, “That’s my favorite dinosaur, too.” And from then on, it became our thing.

Jack took to me immediately— which was the greatest relief of my life. He wanted to see me every chance he got, to play with me when I was free, to sleepover at our house whenever we were in town. He liked asking me for ice cream because he knew that I would give it to him since his dad wouldn’t. He liked how I would help him with his homework, and how I was better at it than Hotch. He liked giving me Superman hugs. He liked hearing about my adventures. He liked it when I would read him stories before bed. He liked it when I would tuck him in. He liked it when I would cuddle him during movies. He liked it when I told him I loved him. He liked it when I said his name. He liked it when his dad and I would take him to the park. He liked it when I would pick him up from school. He liked it when I went to his soccer games. He liked that I would make him breakfast on weekends.

He was my little man, and he was gone. He was my _son_ , and he was gone.

How was I supposed to live now? How was I supposed to function? How was I supposed to breathe? How was I supposed to walk into our house and not think about him? How was I supposed to look at this dinosaur in my hands and not fall to my knees and cry out for him? When was it going to stop hurting? When were Hotch and I going to stop crying? When were we supposed to move on? When could we forget about him so that it wouldn’t be painful to think about him?

He had only been gone a few minutes, and it felt like an eternity. I thought to myself that maybe Morgan would come racing into the room to tell us that they magically caught Foyet before Haley and Jack could even leave the parking lot, and that our junior superhero could come back in and never leave us again.

Jack was our whole world. He meant more to me and Hotch than anything else. I never thought I could love someone the way I loved Hotch and Jack. But I fell in love with both of them the moment I met them respectively, and I hadn’t looked back since. Being apart from Jack during cases was already hard enough, but we had our phone calls, and video chats, and videos that Haley would send us of him playing soccer. We would always leave, knowing that we would come back and get to see him. That was what kept us alive and moving. But now he was gone… It was hard leaving him all those times before, but this… not knowing when or if we’d ever get to see him again… it was the worst feeling in the world. It made me feel like I couldn’t move. All I could do was stay on that bed with Hotch, cradled under his arm, both of us sobbing over the loss of our family.

“I want him back,” I sobbed. “Bring him back. Please.” Hotch whimpered as we squeezed each other, ignoring his wounds for just a moment. “I want our little man back…. Please… Aaron…” He was speechless. “I want to wake up…” I hid my face in his side. “I want this nightmare to be over.”

“Shhh…” he tried to coo me, knowing that talking wasn’t going to help. I felt him kiss the top of my head. “I love you.”

I couldn’t even find the strength to say it back. Every time I tried to open my mouth again to respond, I only cried harder. Hotch seemed just as bad. While I had only just rambled thoughtlessly, Hotch couldn’t even get that far. Just saying “I love you” without cracking was hard enough. Trying to find the right words to comfort me was damn near impossible.


	32. COME HOME

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Impregnation kink. Soft sex. Emotional sex. The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying “good girl”.
> 
> TIMELINE: A month after part thirty-one.

I sighed as I pushed all of Hotch’s work to the side just so that I could get to _my_ desk in _our_ office. Since getting out of the hospital about two weeks ago, Hotch had turned our home office into a conspiracy theory pit. He had so many pictures of Foyet, his victims, the crime scenes, the news clippings about The Reaper, and so on hung on the walls that I couldn’t even remember what color the walls were. About a week into this whole project of his was when he pulled out the red string. From there, our office became a maze. It was like I was goddamn Catherine Zeta Jones in _Entrapment_ the way I was weaving through all of it.

But I couldn’t tell him to take it down. Hotch spent two weeks in the hospital, and then he had to spend another two weeks at home as he recovered from Foyet’s attack, underwent physical and psychological evaluations, and I practically made him go on bed rest the rest of the time. Because he wasn’t allowed to go back to work, he had to spend his time working on finding Foyet. I hated that I had to go to work every day without him because of that. I knew that this was eating at him, and I couldn’t stay around long enough to console him or talk him down. It was irritating both of us.

It had only been a month since we said goodbye to Haley and Jack, yet it felt like an eternity. My little man… Every day we were forced apart, I felt a piece of me die. Was that odd? Was it weird to miss someone else’s son like he was your own? Was it weird that I took Red, mine and Jack’s favorite dinosaur, with me everywhere? To the office, on cases, at home. Everywhere. It probably wasn’t as weird as when I would come home to find Hotch napping on Jack’s bed. That mattress was way too small for him. I mean, he would curl up on it as much as possible, and yet his feet would somehow still be hanging off the edge. But it was how he was coping. It was how we were both coping. And the worst part was, we were doing it separately.

In our line of work, Hotch and I had worked dozens of cases with parents that lost a child in a kidnapping or murder. The BAU didn’t just specialize in profiling the Unsubs and victimology—that was a large part of it, obviously, but there was an unspoken part of the job that always struck me during those kinds of cases. Parents mourning the loss of a child were profiled to inevitably always split up. Like the case we worked in Vegas just before Dallas, a son had been kidnapped while walking to a friend’s house, and the parents were slowly drifting apart. They blamed each other. They couldn’t bear to even look at each other. Getting them to cooperate with the investigation so that we could find their son was nearly impossible. Yet we weren’t shocked by that behavior, because that was how mourning couples were always profiled. I just never thought that it would happen to me and Hotch.

No one ever expects that they’re going to lose everything. No one anticipates having to say goodbye to their son. A month ago, we had to say goodbye to Jack, and we honestly weren’t sure if we were ever going to see him again. Foyet was playing the long game with us now. Who knew when he was going to turn up again with another clue so that we could find him? There was a chance that by the time we either caught up to him or he died, Jack wouldn’t know who we were, so there’d be no point in bringing him back. There was a chance that his life would be better off without us. And that was damn near impossible to admit.

However, I thought that Hotch and I were going to come to terms with all of this _together._ I thought that because we loved each other, and because we knew what the profiles said, that we would somehow work together to prove the profile wrong and work through this side by side. That was what I thought. I spent every day with him when he was in the hospital and I wasn’t on a case. Every single goddamn day. Yet, when he came home, he locked himself in his office, and he practically stopped looking at me altogether.

I would cry every night. I would get home from work, and there were times when I couldn’t even make it to the couch. I would just collapse right there in the entryway, and I wouldn’t get up until the sun started rising for another day. And Hotch never came to hold me. There were other times when I’d come home to hear him sobbing in the office, and I thought about going to console him, but he had locked the door. When I initially tried playing with the doorknob, Hotch immediately stopped crying. He sniffled then told me to go away. So, I stopped trying to go in after that. He stopped trying with me, so I inevitably stopped trying with him. One night, I even thought about moving out. I mean, we weren’t acting like a couple. We had proved the profile correct, and I knew that once that happened—statistically speaking—we were never going to get back together. But I still held on hope. I prayed that he would finally take a moment to realize that he could break down in front of me. I would be there to hold him when he needed it. Until then, there was nothing I could do.

The minute he was cleared to go back to work, Hotch took it. I didn’t think he would go back so soon. One, because of his injuries; two, because going back to work meant that he wouldn’t have all day, every day to pointlessly look for Foyet. He hadn’t found a single goddamn lead in a month, but he was still hacking at it. That was why I was shocked when he gave it up just to go back to the BAU. We even had an argument about it. The day he finally came out of the office to tell me he passed all of his exams, I cracked. I was so fucking pissed at him. He spent a month refusing to look at me, talk to me, sleep in the same bed as me, eat the fucking dining table with me—and then he had the fucking audacity to smile at me and say, “I’m going back to work tomorrow.”

I lost my shit. Truly. I looked back at him and said, “I don’t care what the Bureau says, I don’t want you going back yet. They’re not the ones who have to worry about you, Aaron!”

Hotch’s smile fell. “Drop it.”

I shook my head. “I know you lied during your psych evals. I know that you pushed yourself too hard during your physicals— I saw all the bloody gauze in the trash. So, don’t you dare fucking lie to me again like you did in Cincinnati, Aaron Hotchner—”

“I told you to fucking drop it!” he bellowed. I took a frightened step back. His face immediately softened. “Y/N— I’m sorry—”

“I’m going to Morgan’s house.” I looked at the floor. “I guess I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

And that was how I ended up in the office upstairs, trying to get into my desk so that I could grab some old paperwork for reference on the case report I was currently working on. I was going to Morgan’s house, but that didn’t mean I was going to stop working. Once I had that stuff, I grabbed my spare go-bag from the closet, then made my way downstairs.

Hotch tried to step in my path at the bottom of the stairs, but I pushed past him. He was attempting to apologize profusely while following me around. I kept my head high and just moved to the front door as fast as I could. Since Foyet attacked him, Hotch had practically turned our house security system into something that rivaled the fucking security systems at the office. He had someone come in to put in a new alarm that was set _at all times_. If we weren’t home, all of the windows, doors, and motion sensors were set. If someone opened a door, broke a window, or moved within the house, about seven different alarms would start going off. When we were at home, only the doors and windows were set. But if we wanted to leave the house, we had to put a code into the alarm first; and when we were coming home, we had to put the code in as fast as possible before the alarms would be set off. So, while Hotch tried to make me stay, I reached around him to put my code in, then headed out.

“Y/N!” he shouted angrily at me again as he stormed into the yard. “Y/N, get back here!”

I flipped him off as I kept walking to my car. I wasn’t even going to take _our_ car. We put my car, the one I had been using before I moved in with Hotch, in the garage sized shed at the back of the driveway, just against the fence to the backyard. It hadn’t been used in so long… I mean, if we needed to use separate cars, I’d dust mine off so that Hotch could have our car, but for the most part, we made it work with one car. This time, though, I was taking my car to make a point. He fucked up. This argument was bad, but it was more than that. This was the result of a month’s worth of fuck ups, and I was sick of it.

I didn’t want to leave him. I loved Hotch more than anything, and I was still convinced that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, even when things were bad like this. But I couldn’t stay. Not when I could see that he was ruining his own life for nothing. I told him in Cincinnati that I wouldn’t tolerate him fucking up his own health for selfish reasons. He promised me that he wouldn’t pull this shit again. And yet… There we were… He was fucking it all up _again_. And I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t watch him slowly deteriorate. I loved him too much to do that to either of us.

“Y/N—” he banged on my window as I slowly backed out of the driveway. “I’m sorry, please. Baby… Come on… I’m sorry. Stop this. I get it— I shouldn’t have yelled— Baby— I’m sorry—” He had to stop hitting his palms against my windows as the car turned onto the road. He slammed his hands as hard as he could onto the hood of the car. “Goddammit, Y/N! Get out of the fucking car!” I stared him down because he wasn’t moving out of the way. “Stop this, baby,” he pleaded calmly. “Just come home.” I shook my head. He frowned again, his eyes glinting a slight dark red as anger overtook him again. “Get out of the car,” he demanded once more, making his way over to my car door to try and pry it open, even though it was locked. The second he wasn’t in front of the car, though, I laid my foot down on the gas and raced off.

When I got to Morgan’s house, I explained everything, and he set me up in his guest room. This wasn’t the first time I had sought asylum in his house. Since Hotch wasn’t there to comfort me, I had to turn to the only other person who could, and that was Morgan. Granted, this was the first time I was _sleeping over_. But still. There were plenty of afternoons when I’d detour to his house after work just to cry on his couch as he held me. If I would wake up in the middle of the night with a nightmare of finding Hotch dead on our living room floor, I’d drive over to Morgan’s house and cry on his couch until I could calm down. It was unfair to Morgan. I recognized that. He was his own man with his own life and problems, and there I was, always barging in unannounced to unload my problems. But where else was I going to go? There were times when I thought about how much I missed Elle, and I wanted her to be there for me in moments like this, but she was gone. She abandoned me… and… she wasn’t coming back, apparently. Morgan was all I had.

As it got late, and we both needed to rest, he offered to stay and sleep with me, but I told him I’d be fine. He reluctantly obeyed (not for the reason most people would assume). It was no secret that Derek Morgan was a “playa”, to put it in his terms. He liked getting into the pants of any and every girl that would give him consent, and he liked teasing Garcia in a… less than platonic way, and sometimes we would do that, too, but not really. That being said, Derek Morgan would never, ever take advantage of someone, especially when they were as vulnerable as I was that night. He only offered to sleep in the same bed as me because that was how close we were, and he was willing to comfort me if I needed it. But I knew that I needed some space and time to think, and he needed some sleep in order to be ready for work the next day. So, when I turned him down, he gave in. He kissed my temple, squeezed my shoulders in a tight side embrace, then left the room quietly, carefully closing it behind him.

When he was gone, I opened my go-bag to pull out my pajamas. Yet, when I saw what I had packed away in there, I froze. I had packed this so long ago. I grabbed the first bag I saw. I didn’t even think to check what was in it. I was so fucking stupid. Unfortunately, however, there was nothing I could do about it now. I just had to suck it up and wear them, because it was either wearing what I packed or wearing what I left the house in. Either way, I was _not_ going back just to pick up a different pair of pajamas.

I sighed. Unenthusiastically, I stripped myself of my clothes, then changed into one of Hotch’s old college sweatshirts and a pair of his blue and gold flannel pajama pants to match. I was planning on getting him another pair for his birthday in the next few weeks because I stole his, and I felt bad because of that. Also, because I had originally stolen these and put them in my go-bag recently after the stabbing, figuring that I needed something of his with me on cases while I was gone and he was at home. I had Jack’s red dinosaur toy with me at all times, I just needed Hotch’s clothing with me, too, considering that was the extent of the attention I got from him. But now… Things were just too confusing. I was upset that I didn’t just pack my own goddamn clothes.

That being said, I still cuddled under the blankets, and I pulled the collar of the sweatshirt over my nose to keep me warm while also taking in his scent. Within the past year or so, Hotch had given up his familiar Aqua Velva scent in exchange for a cinnamon and pine. He had gone into his closet one day, pulled out all of my favorite items of his to steal, took them outside, then practically drenched them in the cologne once he knew I liked it. I didn’t know until I came home from dinner with Emily one night to find that the entire fucking house _reeked_ of cinnamon and pine. It took a while for the neighborhood to air out, but once it did, I was left with Hotch’s scent attached to each article of clothing, and I loved it. That night, while lying in a strange bed without the love of my life beside me, I found that my only comfort was that scent. I hugged my torso and inhaled.

I knew that he was sorry. I knew that he didn’t mean for any of this to happen. And, honestly, I knew that neither of us meant for things to blow up the way they did. But now that they had, I wasn’t sure where to go from there, how to navigate all of this. We couldn’t go back to normal. Could we? I’d be the first to admit that he scared me earlier. I knew that he would never hurt me, but deep down, in the pit of my stomach, I was terrified of him. After not having his love for so long, his outburst… It took me aback. There was a moment there, when he shouted at me the first time, I saw a glimpse of that night in high school, and I heard _him_ yelling at me for not cooperating. That was why I had to leave. It wasn’t Hotch’s fault. My mind was playing tricks on me, but I couldn’t let it ruin the one good thing I had in my life: Aaron Hotchner. I just needed some time and space.

Time. And. Space.

That was what I asked for when I arrived at Quantico the next day. Morgan and I drove in at the same time, then he met me at the elevator after we both went through security, and he asked me if I wanted back up (or a mediator) while talking to Hotch. As we stepped into the elevator, I denied his offer quietly. Upstairs, in the BAU, Reid and Emily were trying to show me pictures of Henry, JJ’s son. She had him shortly after Hotch was stabbed. And by _shortly_ , I meant that we hadn’t even left the fucking hospital yet when she went into labor. But now she was itching to get back to work, and I was shocked. It had only been a few weeks. I thought that the human body literally couldn’t handle getting back to work that fast, but maybe she wasn’t looking to work in the field quite yet. I understood if she just wanted to sit in the office to do paperwork around Anderson or hang out in Garcia’s office for a bit. I could understand that. I just thought that she would want to spend more time with Will and Henry, but who was I to judge her? I promised I would never do that after she judged me—and, yes, it was so that I could prove that I was the better person, I wasn’t afraid to admit that.

I headed straight into Hotch’s office. I found that he was sitting on his couch, his head in his hands, an old picture of him, Jack, and Haley in his lap. As I snuck closer, I saw that he had printed a picture of me and him out, and he had it taped to the bottom corner of that picture frame. Our family. Our story. Our _everything_.

I cleared my throat to let him know that I was there. “Sorry, I’ll come back later.”

Hotch looked up from his hands. When he realized that I was really standing there in front of him, he threw the photos to the side and jumped to his feet. “No, wait—” He hurried over to me. “Please.”

I stopped. “Okay.”

“Baby, I am _so_ sorry.” He wasn’t getting close enough to put a hand on me, which I silently appreciated. “I didn’t mean to yell or get worked up. I’ve just been so worried—”

“Aaron, I really didn’t come to make up.”

His posture changed to something more shy and confused. “What?”

“I’m sorry… But, I, uh… I’m just here as an employee right now.”

Hotch searched my eyes for a moment while he tried to understand what was happening. I wasn’t looking him in the eye, I wasn’t trying to impress him with anything, and I wasn’t even trying to give us privacy by closing the door. In fact, I didn’t want privacy. I didn’t want to give him a chance to try to hug or kiss me. With the blinds and door still open, he had to obey the rules we created for ourselves at work, and I could tell that it was killing him, but I was there for a specific reason, and it wasn’t because I was ready to hear his apology yet. He might have felt he was ready for it, but I wasn’t.

“Okay,” Hotch said while he nodded. He moved to take a seat at his desk. “Sit.” He gestured to the empty seats across from him. “What’s this about?”

“I’m requesting a few personal days off.”

“Why?”

“You’re not supposed to ask me that, Agent Hotchner.”

His eyes narrowed at me. “It’s my job, Agent Greenaway, to ensure that my team is okay both physically and mentally.”

“Well, I’m fine, Agent Hotchner, thank you for _checking on_ me.”

“Stop this, Y/N. Please.”

“I can formally request this time off through Chief Strauss, if need be.”

He hesitated as his brown eyes added a red tint of anger. “That’ll not be necessary.”

“So, you’ll give it to me?”

“Only if you tell me why.”

“You know why.”

“ _Why?_ ” he asked with a hiss. The tension was growing in the room.

“I just need to clear my head.”

“That’s not good enough!” he exclaimed angrily. I could see that he was holding himself back from hitting the table or swiping his papers off the desk. “What’s this really about? Is it really about our argument, Y/N? Can we please, for a minute, just stop dancing around the truth and _say_ what we _feel_ —”

My blood boiled over. “You’re not the only one who lost a son, Aaron!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. There was a moment where we stared at each other as we both realized what I had said. I was shaking so bad. A thought passed by me that maybe I should have stopped there, left it alone, gone home to take another breather. But I wasn’t wrong. Jack was my son, too. I lost him, too. I was hurting, too. And I needed Hotch there to hold me, but he wasn’t. So, I continued, “I was right there with you when we saw him for the last time. You aren’t the only one suffering here, Hotch. I wake up every day and I wish that I could turn the corner in our home and see him sitting at the table, eating Cheerios for breakfast. I wish that we could still take him to soccer every Saturday. And I fucking _wish_ that I could keep spoiling him even though you tell me not to. I love your son like he’s my own, Aaron. I know he’s not mine, and I know that he never will be… but, damn it, I love you and I love him. And the fact that we’re both mourning over losing him to this _asshole_ , and I’m trying to be there for you, but you keep pushing me away when _I_ need you, too… That’s cruel. It’s unfair. I have never felt more alone than I have over the past month. You need to get your shit together, and I need some time to come to terms with the fact that I may never see Jack again. So, I’ll ask you again, may I please have some time off?”

He paused while staring at me. I could see a sparkle in his eyes that came from the tears welling, the apologetic and deeply sorry tears. It broke my heart to see him like that. It absolutely tore me in half to see him cry because of something I said… but what else was I supposed to do? He wanted me to tell him the truth, so I did. It hurt to do it, but it was necessary, and now that he knew just how horrible he had been, I could tell that he didn’t want to be angry anymore. Now that he understood, I realized that he just wanted to hold me and apologize until he couldn’t breathe. But I still needed time. As much as I would’ve loved to be in his arms, kissing him, telling him that I’d always love him… I needed time away to clear my head. I needed time away from him to come to terms with the loss we had.

“Where are you going to go?” he croaked.

I lied and said that I was going to stay at a hotel for a few days before returning to work; but we both clearly knew that I was staying with Morgan. I wanted to be with someone I trusted. I wanted to be with someone I loved. I didn’t want to be alone. Morgan’s house was a safe haven for me whenever I needed it, and I usually didn’t take him up on the offer, but now I was in desperate need of it.

“Okay,” Hotch gave in. “Take all the time you need. But… Y/N… I need you to know that you will always have a place here, and you will always have a place back at home with me.”

I stared at him for another second before pushing myself out of my seat. “I’ll see you in a few days, Agent Hotchner.”

After leaving Hotch’s office, I saw that the entire office was staring at me. Maybe I should’ve closed the door, in hindsight. Nothing to do about it now, though. They all heard every single word, and now they couldn’t look away from the train wreck that was Y/N Greenaway and Aaron Hotchner. I was sure that somewhere out there, wherever he was, Jason Gideon was laughing and saying: “I told you so.” No one else in the office seemed to be thinking that, especially after the screaming match I just had with our boss, but I knew that Gideon was chuckling somewhere in the world.

I started my walk of shame down the ramp. Even Rossi had come out of his office to lean against his doorframe while watching me, probably waiting for a perfect opportunity to sneak into Hotch’s office to comfort him— or maybe even talk some sense into him. I hoped that it was the latter.

* * *

A few days later, I heard the front door of Morgan’s place open up. I turned on the couch to see an exhausted Morgan throw his used go-bag onto the floor, then crash onto the empty couch space next to me. He sighed and rested his head on my lap. He had been away on a case since the day I left Hotch’s office after we argued. We had been texting since he left because he wanted to make sure I was alright and that I was taking care of Clooney, his German Shepard. I loved that dog. I thought he was adorable—and he was so well behaved. He rested at my feet on the bed every night to keep me company. It was nice to have company, even though Morgan was away and I wasn’t talking to Hotch.

“You know, I’ll leave and go to a hotel, if you want me to. I don’t mean to just… intrude on your life,” I said after giving him a moment to relax.

Morgan looked up at me upside down. “Never.” He smirked, “Unless you’re going to be living here any longer than a month, in which case, you need to start paying rent.”

I matched his smirk, “No. I just need a couple more days, I think. If that.”

He nodded understandingly. “You wanna order take out for dinner?”

“Sure.”

He did a sit up before standing on his feet and hurrying over to the house phone so that he could order dinner for us. I sighed and relaxed in Hotch’s sweatshirt. It was starting to smell less and less like him, which only made me more desperate to get home. But I liked the freedom I had been experiencing over the past few days. With the time I got to spend on my own in silence, I got to think about how much I missed my little man, while coming to terms with the fact that this was the best choice—the only choice we could make. Sending them away in order to protect them was the right thing to do. Jack was safe with Haley. They were safe under Sam’s protection. Coming to terms about that much was hard while I was around Hotch, who was only moping around all day. Now that some time had passed, I was a bit calmer about the situation, and I was just ready to get our family back. But I still needed another day or two, just for good measure. After that, I’d race to apologize profusely to Hotch, begging for him to take me back after running away like that. I felt like a bitch, okay. Maybe it was a bit overdramatic to run away, but at the time, I didn’t know what else to do. But now that the tension had sizzled out and I was clear headed about the situation, I realized how sorry I was for leaving in the first place.

When the food arrived, Morgan and I sat crisscross on the couch while facing each other and talking about whatever came to mind. At some point, casual talk turned to work talk. As it always did. I asked him to tell me about the case the team just got back from, and he told me that they had dealt with an Unsub who was drowning his victims in methanol in order to get rid of their stench. When I asked how it ended, he hesitated.

“Morgan?”

He gulped and told me that Hotch took off his vest, handed his gun to Rossi, then went inside to negotiate a peaceful surrender with the Unsub. My eyes shot wide. Why the fuck did Hotch do that? Why would he— I didn’t understand. How could he be so stupid? How could he risk his life like that? How could he risk leaving me and Jack behind? How was I supposed to live with the fact that we ended on bad terms if something were to have happened to him?

“What happened?” I asked, frightened.

Morgan pushed his food around in order to give himself a reason to not look at me. “The Unsub shot the girl, ran away, got in his cab, and we started chasing after him. Half of the city was looking for him, Y/N, yet, somehow, Hotch was the one who found him. The guy tried speeding off again to get away from Hotch, but when Hotch shot at him, he crashed into a truck, immediately killing him.”

“Is Hotch okay?” I leaned forward to express my eagerness for a positive answer. He hesitated again. “Derek Morgan, you tell me right now—”

“He’s okay, Y/N.”

I relaxed and let out a breath. “Good.”

“But…”

My eyes shot up at him. “But?”

“Strauss temporarily promoted me to Unit Chief.”

“What? Why?”

“Because Hotch isn’t fit to be in a position of power right now, sunshine. We both know that. He isn’t fit to lead a team right now.” He set his food on the table next to us. “Strauss and Rossi made the decision when we got off the plane.” He grabbed my hands. “It’s just until Hotch is back to being Hotch, honey bunches, I promise.”

I scoffed. “And how long do you think that’ll be?”

“I’m not sure. But I think that if you went back to work, it might help some.” His eyes pouted at me. “He has nothing to live for right now, Y/N. You left, Jack and Haley are gone, Foyet’s taunting him, and his ability to do this job is… being questioned. Having you around, as you are, it might remind him that he still has everything to live for.”

I understood that he couldn’t read my mind. I knew that he couldn’t’ve possibly known that I had already decided that I was going to go back to work soon, so it made sense that he felt he needed to tell me that Hotch’s best chance was going back. So, I gave in just for the sake of making Morgan feel like he did something.

“I think I’m gonna head to bed early,” I said quietly.

“What? No—Y/N, I didn’t mean to upset you or—”

“Morgan, it’s not your fault.” I set my food to the side. “I, um… Tomorrow… It’s just going to be a long day, so I should get some extra sleep.”

“Sugar, I really didn’t mean to—”

“Tomorrow is Jack’s birthday.”

He immediately fell silent, his shoulders giving out his posture when he realized he had pried too far. He apologized quietly. I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn’t care about his prying, but it got caught in my throat when a sob bubbled up a little too far. I excused myself before running to “my” room.

I crashed onto the bed. As I pulled the covers up over my body, hiding my head from the world, I grabbed my phone and opened the Photos app. The sob I was holding back finally crashed through me when I saw a picture of Hotch and Jack cuddling in the hammock in our backyard. Hotch had been laying out there after work, watching Jack play soccer. By the time dinner was ready, I went outside to collect them, only to find that Jack had given up on kicking the ball around so that he could lay on his dad’s chest. Hotch’s arms were wrapped around Jack’s entire body. They were dead asleep, probably had been for at least an hour. I couldn’t bother them when they were like that. So, I took a picture, then let them be. Finally, when it got too cold, they came inside, Jack still half asleep in his dad’s arms as he was carried upstairs to his room.

That was such a perfect night. We had dozens of nights like that, where the small, random things were taken for granted. Now that we didn’t have Jack, I wished I could go back in time. I wished that I would’ve just sat outside on the patio while drinking my wine, feeling the way my heart swelled as they snored together, the hammock rocking under them.

I reached over for Red, mine and Jack’s favorite toy, and I pulled it close to my chest. Tomorrow was going to be horrible to bear alone.

* * *

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of Morgan knocking on my door. I groaned and rolled over to check my phone for the time. That was when I realized that I hadn’t charged it all night. I went to bed around three, my eyelids too heavy from crying for so long. Since I hadn’t plugged my phone in, it was obviously dead. I groaned again. The door opened once Morgan heard me shuffling around on the bed. I hid my puffy face under the comforter while simultaneously trying to trick him into thinking that I was asleep. I felt like Jack. Jack… It was officially his birthday. I mean, I had been awake when the clock struck midnight, but this was different. The sun was out, the birds were chirping, and Morgan was telling me that he was leaving for work. It truly was Jack’s birthday now. There was no escaping it.

The mattress sank slightly as Morgan sat next to me. He put a hand on my shoulder, then leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “I’ll see you when I get home—if we’re not called away on a case.” He made a move to stand.

I grabbed his hand, revealing my red and swollen eyes. “Take it easy on Hotch today. Don’t let anyone give him a hard time. Please.”

“I’ll try.”

He kissed my forehead gently again, then silently stood and left the room, making sure to reclose the door behind him on his way out. I huffed and slumped back onto the pillows, feeling the way I sunk into the comfort of the blankets, the mattress, and the feather pillows. My relaxation didn’t last long, though, because the next thing I knew, the sound of scratching on the door disturbed me. I rolled out of bed and opened the door so that Clooney could run in. He jumped onto my bed and nuzzled his nose under the blankets. I smiled. At least I had someone to keep me busy during the day.

I was reminded of my dead phone on the bed when Clooney kicked it by accident. I plugged it in without hesitating another second. While I waited for it to charge, I played with Clooney’s long hair. He got riled up after a few seconds, deciding to playfully attempt to bite me while I waved my hand in his face. When I heard my phone chime, I booped his nose, then turned to pick it up.

Two missed calls.

I scrolled the rest of my notifications to realize that it was Emily and Anderson who had attempted to contact me. I didn’t want to hear from them, though. Anderson was probably calling on behalf of Hotch, meanwhile Emily was only going t o try to convince me to return to work sooner. I wished that I was a telepath so I could just tell everyone what I was thinking, that way they would leave me alone. I was planning on going back to work soon. I had been over it a hundred times in my head. But if people kept bothering me about it, I was just going to be more reluctant about it.

An hour later, my phone started buzzing again. I pet Clooney as he shuffled onto my lap. My phone just kept buzzing, however, as another call came through. I cursed under my breath, then stretched to pick it up, recognizing the photo and the name flashing on the screen almost immediately. I waited a second. Morgan must have talked to him. After seeing me glued to the bed, left to nothing but a puddle of tears, Morgan probably went straight to Hotch, told him that I was suffering today, and Hotch decided to finally call me after all this time.

I answered.

Silence echoed throughout my room as I waited for something to happen. Even Clooney stilled. It had been so long, I wasn’t sure who should speak first, or if I should even speak at all. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing. After how things ended between us the last time we saw each other, I knew that what I said was wrong. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes. I didn’t want to push him away further than he already was.

And then it happened.

“Hey,” I heard his voice for the first time in about a week.

I nearly melted. “Hey,” I whispered back.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “I’m fine. Are you?”

He hesitated before changing the subject. “I know that I’m not supposed to be calling—”

“It’s okay.”

Hotch hesitated another second. “It’s, um,” he cleared his throat, “it’s Jack’s birthday today.”

“I didn’t forget.”

Of course, I didn’t. How could I when our dinosaur had been sitting on my bed all day, staring at me, and I broke down every time I glanced at it. Jack had been so excited to spend his birthday with us. He was going to have a party at Chuck-E-Cheese with his friends, as disgusting as it was. We were going to get Spider-Man and Superman balloons, superhero themed paper plates, cups, and silverware. I was going to buy a set of Spider-Man walkie talkies for him and his dad to use, or maybe one of those Bat Signal toys so that he could flash it up at the sky whenever he was thinking of us when we were at work. I had all of these ideas to make that day special for him, but George Foyet took that all away. There were going to be no pictures of Jack blowing out his birthday candles, or opening his gifts, or hugging his dad after we wished him a happy birthday. There were going to be no memories of him running around Chuck-E-Cheese with his friends, bragging about how many tickets he got, and Hotch telling him that he was proud. There were going to be no conversations of me trying to convince him to get one prize or another. And there wasn’t going to be a single argument between me and Hotch about me spoiling Jack too damn much. That happiness left when Foyet practically stole him away from us.

“When are you coming home, Y/N? I know I shouldn’t ask, but…”

“I thought about coming home tomorrow, actually.”

“Can I see you before then?”

“Aaron, I…”

“Sam called to tell me that he had to move Haley and Jack again. Apparently, she’s been calling her dad and Jessica.”

I sighed and hid my face in my left palm. This day was already hard enough, but to just keep digging at the hole in my heart wasn’t helping. I thought that, of all people, Haley would do anything to protect Jack. George Foyet was a psychopath with a mission. Why would she risk Jack’s safety just to call her Roy and sister when Sam had told her a thousand times that she couldn’t be in contact with _anyone_ until we found Foyet.

“Are they okay?” I asked.

“They're fine. Sam sent me a video of Jack playing on the swings this morning. He looks… happy.”

“He—” I hesitated to think about it. We hadn’t heard Jack’s voice in so long… We hadn’t seen his bright face in what felt like forever. We hadn’t gotten to hear his laugh since the day Foyet took him from us. A tear slid down my cheek as I considered it. “Could you hear him? See him?”

“Yeah,” Hotch said quietly. “It’s fuzzy, and it’s at a distance, but he says your name. He says he misses you.” Another tear escaped me. “I’d like to show it to you… You don’t have to stay long, just come into the office for a bit. I… I really just…” He cleared his throat again, trying to hold back an obvious sob building in his throat. “I need to hold you. Just for a bit today. I need it really bad, Y/N.”

A tear slid down my cheek. I needed him, too. No matter how mad I was with him, no matter how upset he made me after our blow up, there was only one thing that could make this day somewhat bearable. It was the same thing that Hotch needed. Being in his arms was the only thing that could ever really comfort me nowadays, and I thought earlier about how I needed him to hold me to make the day easier. I thought that he wouldn’t want to see me. After how things ended the last time we saw each other, I thought he would never want to see me again. I had said some pretty hurtful things. Though I meant them, it didn’t erase that they probably stung him to hear.

“I need you, too,” I whispered.

I heard him let out a quiet cry. “Come home to me, baby. Please.”

“I’m coming.” I stood from the bed and raced to grab my purse. “I’m coming, baby.”

His voice perked up, “I love you so much.”

* * *

I changed before driving to the office. I had been stuck in Hotch’s pajamas for days, which wasn’t exactly… attractive, and I definitely didn’t smell good. Maybe that was why Clooney was so fond of me. Changing was also important because I was heading to my place of work. I wasn’t going to be a visitor there. I couldn’t exactly show up in a sweatshirt and pajama pants. So, I used what I had in my go-bag to look work-ready, then I headed off to the office.

The parking lot security didn’t recognize my vehicle since I was arriving in my old one. The fact that they didn’t recognize it only prolonged my wait to see Hotch again. They had to check my credentials, then give me a new parking pass for the car—and the whole thing was just a fucking mess. But the second they let me past the barricade, I sped towards the closest parking spot I could find to the building, parked, then ran inside. Security welcomed me with smiles and innocent questions, just like they always did. They were an awesome group of people that were absolutely underappreciated by the agents in our building. There were times when they told me that Garcia and I were two of the only people who ever even _acknowledged_ them, let alone took time out of our days to get to know them. As always, I told them that it was my pleasure, but the second the niceties were over, I ran to the elevator down the hall.

As the elevator opened to reveal the sixth floor, I squeezed through the doors. Garcia was walking out of the BAU, a fresh cup of coffee in her hand. She froze when she saw me, a smile lighting up her face, and I tried smiling back as much as I could even though all of my energy was focused on getting to Hotch. She must have realized what was going on because she held the glass door open for me. I thanked her as I snaked by.

Everyone in the bullpen stopped and turned when Reid spotted me first. I smiled and waved as I kept my head down and maintained my clear path up the ramp, leading towards Hotch’s office. Emily tried calling out my name, but Morgan hushed her and I kept moving. It was nothing against her, but I was there for a singular purpose: Aaron Hotchner.

“Hi,” I said, stumbling into his office. I was so out of breath from running there. I was panting behind my forced smile.

Hotch looked up from the files on his desk. “Hi.”

“I want to see him. I want to see my little man.” My eyes were already watering up, a desperate plea for Hotch’s help to ease my breaking heart. “Please.”

“Close the blinds and lock the door.”

I nodded and turned to do so. Because Hotch and I technically weren’t supposed to have any kind of contact with Haley and Jack, no one else could see the video we were sent. If WITSEC changed their appearance and someone saw, it could put them in danger. If there was anything revealing in that video about where they had been before they were moved because Haley had been in contact with her dad, then it could put them in danger. Hotch and I couldn’t take that risk.

When I was done, I sat down in one of the empty seats across from Hotch. He turned his computer so that it was facing down the width of the desk, giving Hotch and I equal opportunity to see the screen and the video that was queued up. Even while the video was paused, I could see Jack on the swings, his legs kicked out since he had just gotten enough momentum to move forwards, and he was about to go flying back. I grabbed Hotch’s hand from the spacebar, tangling my fingers with his. Both of our breaths hitched.

“Are you sure—”

I nodded. “Do it.”

Hotch pressed the spacebar, then flipped his hand over so that he could hold my hand better. The video began. Jack started swinging back, his legs tucked under the seat. He was laughing. He was laughing, and kicking, and he looked like he was having so much fun. Haley pushed him forward again. He giggled and gave a “whoo” as he flew through the air again.

“It’s time!” Sam called from behind the camera.

Haley looked over with worry since Jack couldn’t see her. He was still having the time of his life, despite the fact that Sam and Haley were both telling him that it was time to get off the swings so that they could leave. Jack dragged his sneakers on the dirt beneath him to slow his momentum. After a few light, useless swings, Jack came to a stop, so he could safely jump off. Haley took his hand. He smiled up at her before he started skipping alongside her on their way to meet Sam at the car in the parking lot.

“Can we see Dad and Y/N now?” Jack asked.

I let out a sob, my face falling carefully against the desk. Hotch reached out to pet my hair back comfortingly, helping me through each of the tears that slid down my cheeks and every single whine that left my throat.

“No, baby, we’re not going home yet,” Haley said.

“But I want to see Y/N!” he complained. “I miss them.”

I tilted my head so that my cheek was pressed against the cold wood of the desk, but also so that I could glue my gaze back to the screen.

“I know, Jack,” she said while picking him up. “But we have to go somewhere else for our trip. Aren’t you excited?”

“Where are we going?”

The was when the video cut out.

“No, wait—” I gasped, sitting up straight. “There has to be more. That can’t be it.”

“That’s all of it, baby,” Hotch said apologetically.

“Play it again.”

Hotch did so. The video started replaying, Jack’s laugh echoing throughout the room. And then it was over faster than it was the first time, somehow. I sighed and let my head fall against the desk again.

“Come on, baby, don’t do that,” Hotch begged.

“I’m so sorry, Aaron. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

“No. _I’m_ sorry. It’s all my fault.”

“It’s not—”

“It all goes back to that night in the hotel, Y/N. If I would’ve just taken the deal, none of this would be happening to us.”

“Stop,” I insisted while sitting up and sniffling. “I don’t blame you.”

He handed me a tissue from the box next to his elbow. “I’m sorry for being an asshole. I was blinded by hatred for Foyet and the need for revenge that I didn’t see how much of a douchebag I was being while you were suffering, too. It was insensitive of me, baby, and I’m so sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

I dodged his apology after a moment of silence. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You know… with missing Jack’s birthday for the first time?”

Hotch had never missed mine, Jack, or Haley’s birthdays before. There were times when we had to miss other holidays, but never a birthday. Ever. That was a day special to that person, and Hotch always wanted to celebrate it with them. When it came to Jack, that urge was even stronger. Jack was apart of this world because of Hotch. He stayed by Haley’s side for hours as she endured labor, and from that pain, they gained a little sunshine, a little miracle of their own. He wouldn’t have missed Jack’s birthday for the world. It was a memory of the good times, and a reminder that Hotch had a reason to live. He had a _son_. He wanted to celebrate that day every single year. But this time… There was no one to celebrate with, and it was noticeable.

He shook his head. “No. But that’s why I called you. I had to see you again and make things right.” We both took a deep breath, clearing away our tears and our overwhelming emotions. Hotch stood from his seat and slowly walked around his desk, taking a knee beside my chair. “I am sorry, Y/N. I don’t think I’ll ever stop apologizing for what I did. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, and I shouldn’t have chased after you like that. I know I scared you, and I’m sorry. You know that I would never lay a hand on you, right?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life making this up to you, Y/N, I just know it.” He took my hand in his. “I could make excuses all day—like how I was just frustrated about how our family is falling apart, and I’m upset the Foyet took the time to specifically go through our house in order to search for the one thing he knew would hurt most to steal… the ring I was going to give you.”

When Hotch and I first met Foyet, we thought that he was just another victim of The Reaper—that he was one of the lucky ones that got away. We were convinced because he distracted us with the one thing that meant everything to us: love. He begged me to not let The Reaper put Amanda’s engagement ring on his next victim. He cried about how he didn’t want that good memory to be ruined by The Reaper. In the end, though, The Reaper put the ring on one of his next victims, and I felt horrible about having broken my promise to Foyet… Only to find out that it was all a lie. It was a facade in order to fuck with us. I didn’t appreciate it. None of us did. He made it personal, and we were all pissed. But what upset me the most was the fact that he knew that using the detail of the engagement ring against me and Hotch would work. That was also how and why he knew to go straight for ours the night he stabbed Hotch.

Now, all I could do was hope and pray that he wouldn’t get the chance to put that ring on anyone’s body. I wanted that ring to be mine. I wanted Hotch to be down on one knee, as he was just then while apologizing to me, and I wanted him to slide that ring onto my finger as I told him: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Aaron Hotchner!” It was my dream. I wanted to call Aaron Hotchner my husband. And I wanted it to be that very ring that he went out of his way to buy after I babied him all the way home from Cincinnati. I wanted to be his. It actually didn’t matter which ring I ended up wearing—or even if I would have one at all. I just wanted to be _his_ , and only his. Getting the ring back was just an added bonus because it came with a free side of “Fuck you, George Foyet”, accompanied with a middle finger.

“I could make those excuses,” he continued, “and I want to… But I won’t. I take full responsibility for my actions. I recognize that what I did was wrong. I shouldn’t have shut you out. I shouldn’t have abandoned you. And I definitely shouldn’t have snapped at you when all you were doing was trying to help me and knock some sense into me.”

“I don’t want you to spend the rest of our lives apologizing, Aaron. I already forgive you. I just want you to spend every second of every day loving me unconditionally. Holding me like this…” I released his hands so that I could grab his face. He grabbed mine, too. “Kissing me like this…” I pressed my lips against his gingerly. “Telling me you love me…”

“I love you…” he whispered.

“It’s music to my ears,” I said, leaning my forehead against his.

Hotch hands snaked under my hips so that he could grab my ass, then lift me out of my seat. I flung my arms around his neck to make sure I wouldn’t fall out of his hold. When he had me out of my chair, I crossed my legs around his waist, feeling his erection pressing against me through both of our pants. We moaned simultaneously. Next thing I knew, to make sure he wouldn’t drop me, Hotch set me down on the edge of his desk.

“Are you—” he tried asking before I cut him off with another kiss. He pulled away. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“What about the rules?”

“Fuck the rules. Aaron, I need this,” I said desperately, rather than seductively.

Of course, I _needed_ him, but I mainly needed the idea of fucking him—of finally sharing that connection with him again after so long of not being anywhere near him. I needed the physical reminder that we loved each other. I didn’t doubt our love or passion, but that didn’t erase the feeling I had growing in the pit of my stomach, and it certainly didn’t make me forget just how wet I was for him already.

“We don’t have to if you’re not ready yet, or if our emotions are too fried—”

“Are you not sure?”

He stared at me for a moment. “I’ve never been more sure in my life.”

I leaned up to kiss him again. “Then, fuck me, Sir.”

Hotch’s lips crashed passionately against mine, his tongue immediately sliding into my mouth, claiming the dominance I loved so much. I grinded my hips against his. He moaned in response, bucking his hips forward, too. My palms dragged down his neck, gliding over his purple button up dress shirt, making their way slowly down to his belt. As my fingers fiddled with the metal clasp, Hotch leaned against me so that he could clear the space on his desk behind me before pushing my back down. I got his buckle undone just in time. Hotch finished the rest of it. He eagerly unbuttoned his pants, then pushed down his zipper. As he stepped out of his pants, I fidgeted with the waistband of mine, waiting for the perfect opportunity to push them down to my ankles. Hotch caught the hint before I could get very far. He yanked my pants and panties down with one fowl swoop, leaving me completely exposed to him.

“Fuck—” I wiggled my hips around to gesture for more. Hotch ran his left pointer finger up my slit, starting at my dripping entrance, working his way up slowly to my throbbing clit. I jerked around when he circled it. “Sir…”

“I don’t want manners right now, Y/N. I just want you.” He cupped my cheeks with his palms so that he could hold me still before kissing me as roughly as he could. “You have to be quiet.”

“I know.”

He nodded. “Okay.” He reached between us in order to push his boxers down to his ankles. “Hold onto me. Please.”

I obeyed, bracing my hands on his shoulders. As he lined his tip up with my entrance, I bit my lip to bar myself from moaning his name as loud as I could. Instead, I opted to whimper, “I want you inside me—” I gasped and let my body fall limp against the desk as he pushed into me slowly. “Aaron…”

“You’re so tight, baby girl. Always so tight and wet for me.” He threw his head back while snapping his hips back, then forward as roughly as he had the strength for.

I saw his muscles tightened under his shirt, and that was when a thought struck me. “You have another shirt in your go-bag, right?”

Hotch thrusted into me again before he realized what it was that I had asked him. He paused. “Why?” I didn’t answer. “Yeah, I have another—” I grabbed onto the seam of buttons lining his chest, and then I yanked them apart. Hotch groaned, thrusting into me as I did so. I screwed my eyes shut and threw my head back in euphoria before I could even get a look at Hotch, like I wanted. “Fuck, baby girl…” He gripped my hips harder. I looked up at him with a smirk, excited to finally see him, but then I froze. Hotch noticed how my face well. “What is it?” he asked as he slowed then stopped.

“Aaron,” I hesitated, my fingers hovering only millimeters from his chest. He stopped to follow my gaze, quickly realizing that this was the first time that I was laying my eyes on his scars. Foyet did that to him… I wanted to cry. “I could have lost you…”

“Look at me,” he whispered as he grabbed my chin between his fingers. My eyes fluttered as I looked up at him through my lashes and foggy eyes. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Ever. I promise.”

I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him closer, feeling him move inside me as he leaned over me. For the first time, I finally felt my hands touch his scars, running over the bumps and cuts. The stitches had been gone for a while, but I could still feel the irritation. I never knew that it was this bad. How was I supposed to know when he had been working tirelessly towards making sure I never found out?

“I love you,” I croaked, letting him pull me in for a kiss.

He thrust his hips forward at a gentle, loving pace. “I love you, too.”

I grabbed onto his shoulders, my fingers digging into his back slightly. With that silent encouragement, Hotch’s hands took ahold of my hips and he started fucking me roughly. I moaned against his collarbone, my legs falling off of him so that he could increase his pace without being held back by me. I propped my feet on the edge of his desk, and my back fell against the wood entirely. Hotch’s hands moved upwards, stopping just on my breasts. He cupped, massaged, and squeezed them as he continued to fuck me as hard as he could. My hands fell from his shoulders, and I ran my fingers over his scars again. I used to be so obsessed with his chest and how he flexed when he’d fuck me like this, but now, I was so scared of looking or touching because I didn’t want to hurt him. I knew that he wasn’t fragile, especially with the strength of every pump he was giving me, but I was still hesitant. I felt like with one wrong move, he could fall apart, and maybe it would be all my fault.

“I can’t lose you,” I whispered, moving to press my palm against his face.

He leaned down and kissed me. I moaned into his mouth as he gave me another passionate thrust that said: “I’m here, my love, and I’m not going anywhere.” I scratched at his back. I couldn’t do anything but quietly moan and whimper. If we were any louder, the whole office would know, and we couldn’t have that. This first time since he was stabbed was imperative to calming our worries and helping us forget our pain… but the team didn’t need to know any of it. There would be another time soon when Hotch and I would be alone, and I’d finally get to moan his name as loud as I wanted while also gasping between saying “I love you” a thousand times. But this… This needed to be quiet. It was passionate, of course, but it _had_ to be quiet, much to my despair.

“I’m close,” he warned. “I’m so fucking close.”

I pulled him towards me so that our chests were pressed together. He hid his face in the crook of my neck, finally letting out a muffled groan. His hips were doing all of the work now, so I started grinding up to help him. That only seemed to encourage his orgasm, because the next thing I knew, his hand snaked between our bodies so that he could press his thumb against my clit.

I hid my face in his shoulder so that my moan would be muffled, too. “Aaron…” I let out a shaky breath. “Aaron, please. Cum in me…” I needed him to fill me. I needed that instinctual reminder that I was his and he was mine. I needed a part of him to carry around for a bit to remember that he was alive and that he was there with me. “Fuck—” My body gave out. I was shaking and panting as my orgasm crashed through me like a wave. As my walls pulsed around him, Hotch groaned into my neck again. My tightness pushed him over the edge, milking out everything he had to offer me.

“Y/N…” he growled in my ear, thrusting into me once more with such a fierceness that I knew I was going to be sore in just a few minutes. “I love you.” I heard how the words got caught in his throat. I heard how he was holding something back. I knew what it sounded like when he was trying not to cry. So, I lifted his head off me. “I love you,” he repeated, moving to kiss me before I could register just how red his eyes were.

I melted into his kiss again, my body relaxing after my overwhelming climax. It was only when I felt one of his tears hit my cheek that I knew he wasn’t okay. I whimpered sadly. All I could do was hold him close, tangling my fingers through his hair, kissing his lips again and again, feeling him soften inside of me. It was like that time we drove back from Cincinnati, and we couldn’t do anything but be grateful for each other. I couldn’t bear to lose him. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could face seeing him like this. Broken, beaten, bruised, wincing in pain. If it happened again, I didn’t know how I was going to survive.

“Does it still hurt?” I asked, referencing his scars. Hotch groaned as he pulled out of me slowly. He reached into his go-bag under his desk, grabbing a dark blue towel to clean me up with. Silently, he wiped my thighs and everywhere between. “Aaron.” He didn’t look at me. My heart sank in my chest at the realization. “They still hurt, don’t they?” Silence still. “Answer me, baby.”

“I don’t…” He gulped back tears. “I don’t know what to say.”

I sat up on the desk to get a better look at him while he hid the towel away, then stood up straight in order to change shirts. I wanted to apologize for ripping the purple one open. But I found that I couldn’t move or speak. He was stretching to pull the sleeves off, wincing as he did so, then he grabbed the red shirt from his go-bag, and started to carefully put it on.

“Come here,” I said, beckoning him closer with one finger. He sighed and stepped towards me. I started buttoning his shirt up for him. “You should’ve told me sooner.”

“I know.”

“We promised to never lie to each other.”

“I know.”

“So, then, why?”

His lip quivered and his eyes reddened. “Because I didn’t want to lose you, too... Turns out closing myself off in order to protect you only ruined everything.”

I finished buttoning his shirt. “I thought you learned that lesson when you first asked me out.”

Back then, when I first joined the team, Hotch entirely ignored me in order to protect me from his feelings. He didn’t think it was appropriate to let me know that he was in love with me. He thought that pushing me away was the only way to save me from him. What he failed to realize was that his decisions only worried me. I became obsessed with his change in behavior. Finally, I broke after Elle’s hostage situation in Texas, so I confronted him. That evening, we admitted that we had feelings for each other, and he took me out to dinner. The rest was history. But that was exactly why we didn’t keep secrets from each other, and we didn’t push each other away. I needed him to comfort me ever since Foyet attacked me— Actually, I wanted to comfort _him_. Bur he never gave me the chance. He pushed me away again, and it tore me down to nothing.

“I told you I’m sorry.”

I got off the desk and collected my panties and pants at the same time he grabbed his boxers and pants. We finished getting dressed simultaneously. As I hopped and shimmied into my pants, I looked at Hotch. “Can we start over? Pretend like the past month never happened?”

“And do what?” he asked while fixing his tie.

“Be us.”

His gaze snapped to meet mine. “I’d love that.”

“You can’t hide up in your office all day, and you can’t shut me out… You can’t keep sleeping in Jack’s room… You have to talk to me.”

He shuffled on the balls of his feet.

“Fine, you don’t have to talk to _me_ , but you have to start going to therapy again.”

“It’s a waste of time and money, Y/N.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I’m not going to sit on a couch and tell some stranger that I miss my son so much I can’t breathe! I’m not going to tell them that I think about how I snapped at you and it almost makes me wish Foyet killed me—”

“Don’t fucking say that,” I hissed. “Ever.”

“You wanted me to talk to you, right? Well, that’s how I feel.”

I inhaled and exhaled deeply, trying to diffuse the tension building in my chest and shoulders. We had just made up; I didn’t want to start arguing with him again. “Okay… Like I said, you don’t have to talk to me… But at least try _one_ more session. You stopped going after we lost Jack and Haley, and I think that’s a big part of why things blew up the way they did. Just one. For me. If you don’t like it, then I won’t make you go again. I think you’ll find it’s helpful, though.”

Hotch sighed, too. “Just one.”

“Just one,” I agreed while nodding.

“Okay.”

I jumped onto my toes and kissed him. “I love you.”

Before he could say it back, there was a knock at the door. Hotch and I parted, fixing ourselves again as quickly as possible, and I returned to my seat at his desk while he went to go unlock the door. When I was settled, I gave Hotch a nod. It looked like nothing had happened between the two of us now, except for the fact that Hotch was wearing a different shirt, but hopefully no one would notice… right…

“Sorry to interrupt,” Rossi apologized from the other side of the door, “but we’ve got a new case.”

I stood from my seat and started walking towards the door to make my way to the boardroom. Hotch stopped me. He looked at Rossi, then asked if we could have another moment alone before closing the door on him. I rolled my eyes at Hotch.

“Don’t do that,” he begged, grabbing my hips in his hands. “Just sit out for one more case. That’s all. One more to collect your thoughts and get settled back in at the house.”

My hands slid around the back of his neck so that my fingers could pull at the ends of his hair gently. He moaned. I smiled and jumped up onto my toes so that I could kiss him. “I love you, Aaron Hotchner. I always have and I always will.”

He let out a breath, letting relief wash over him. “Say it again.”

“I love you. I love you so much. I’ll never stop loving you.”

He pulled me in for another desperate, passionate kiss that kept me pressed against him until I couldn’t breathe. When his lungs gave out, too, he parted from me. “I love you, too.” And then he raced off to be a superhero again.


	33. SECRET ADMIRER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 5 Episode 08. A few days after part thirty-two.

My first case back after my… brief hiatus… had me and Hotch scrambling out of bed around 7AM. Without Jack around the house anymore, there was no rush to wake him up or carry him out to the car while he was asleep so that we could drop him off at Jessica or Haley’s house. It had only been about a month without them, and I could sense that Hotch’s heart was aching every second they were away. I wished that there was something more I could do to ease his pain. I wished that I could look him in the eyes and tell him that it was going to be alright and that we would see them soon, but who knew how long this would all last? Foyet wasn’t done toying with us, but he was certainly done killing other people for the time being, which meant that it was nearly impossible to find him. So, Jack and Haley just had to stay away, there could be no arguments about it… but not being able to go into his room to see him sleeping peacefully or playing with his toys after school and homework… Shit. It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.

The call we got from Morgan about the new case was to tell us that we shouldn’t even bother meeting up at the office because the crime scene was in McLean, Virginia, and the police wanted us there as fast as possible. McLean was only a fifteen minute drive from our house, so by the time we got ready, got in the car, and arrived at the scene, it was approximately 7:30, which was pretty good timing for us, honestly, considering that Hotch was still a little immobile since the attack. Though he had been cleared by doctors to go back into the field, I still caught him cringing in pain from time to time and he needed to take some extra few seconds to catch his breath after running or… well… _anything._

The crime scene was in a suburban neighborhood that still hadn’t woken up, despite all of the cops crawling around. Morgan, Reid, Emily, and Rossi were already meeting with the field agent on the sidewalk outside of the home that was surrounded by yellow caution tape. Hotch turned off the engine before we got out of the car together, bringing the team’s attention to us. I stood at my car door while Hotch came around the front of the car, then I followed his lead up the concrete path.

Hotch introduced himself to Field Agent Anne Hudson before introducing me. She welcomed both of us to the scene and thanked us for getting there as fast as possible. We all started walking through the front yard as she told us what she knew about the scene.

“Three nights ago, the local PD responded to neighbors’ complaints of the family screaming. They found the family buried in the backyard when no one answered the door.” Agent Hudson pushed the back gate open for us and we entered the backyard in a single file line. “The father is serving in Iraq, but his wife and three kids were all here.”

“Does he know?” Hotch inquired.

“Some of it. He was on patrol, so we had to give him limited information so that he could stay on task. He’s headed back as we speak, and we’ll tell him when he lands.”

“Last year,” Rossi said as we approached the mass grave, “the Williams family was found the same way. Their father, Dan Williams, was also serving overseas at the time.”

“Do you think it’s a pattern?” I asked, leaning over the edge of the grave to get a better look.

All four victims were lying face up, side by side, their arms and legs straight at attention. The Unsub had placed them in order of age and displayed them to look like they were sleeping. Whoever did this had remorse for what they did. The way they took care of the bodies once they were dead likely meant that they had a family of their own that they lost, and they wished that they had been taken care of in the same way. With both of the fathers in the Army, the Unsub was probably targeting these families specifically because he knew that it would just be the wife and kids. We were probably looking for a male Unsub whose family died recently, which was his stressor, and now he was taking it out on other families.

“The media sure seems to think so,” Emily scoffed. “They’re already calling this the work of a serial killer.”

“They’re probably right. Both cases are identical. The eldest daughters were both drowned, the mothers were shot point blank in the temple, and the sons were buried alive,” Agent Hudson said. “Let me show you guys inside.”

We stepped away from the grave to follow her through the backdoor of the house. We entered the kitchen to find crime scene markers everywhere. There was blood on the tile floor, marble counters, and bright white walls. In the wall just beside the door we came through, there were two bullet holes— and since Hudson told us that the mothers were shot point blank, the bullet holes were probably a result of a struggle or an attention grabber. But how did the neighbors hear the screaming but not the gunshots?

“Y/N, check out the bedrooms,” Hotch ordered.

I nodded and found the hallway that led to the bedrooms. The daughter’s was the first one on the right. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. She had pink painted walls, a laptop on her desk, navy blue bedding, a bookshelf filled with uncommon novels, which proved that she was an avid reader. There were mini horse statues around the room, and the wall a picture of her standing next to a horse, so she was likely an equestrian. Her bedside table had an open book with a bookmark shoved between the pages she ended on, and there were two picture frames on either side of the gold lamp— both images of her with her dad. They looked like a normal family, and she looked like a normal teenage girl; no sign of why someone would do this to them.

So, I moved onto the sons’ room. They were twins, it seemed. Between their bunk beds and everything seemingly identical, that was the only explanation. They had the same navy blue bedding— probably because of their Army father wanting everything to seem consistent because that was what he knew best— and there were toys everywhere on the floor to the point that I had to tiptoe around all of the different stray Lego pieces and toy robots. I stopped in my tracks halfway through the room when I saw a toy dinosaur on its feet surrounded by all kinds of toy cars… My heart wrenched as I thought about how Jack used to play with our favorite dinosaur like that all the time… When he wasn’t begging me to play with him, he’d pretend like he was wrangling the dinosaur using his Hot Wheels and G.I. Joe trucks. He liked to think that he was in Jurassic Park, just like these kids.

I hurried from the room before I could feel the soreness in my throat continue to build as I tried to suppress the urge to cry. The parents’ room was the last one in the hallway, and that was where I finally found remnants of a struggle. The closet was wide open, the clothes torn off the hangers like someone had been grabbing onto them for dear life while being pulled out. There were scuff marks on the floor, too, drops of blood trailing in the bedroom, probably from the Unsub after he killed the mother in the kitchen. One of the sons must have run into the furthest room to find safety and hid in the closet, thinking that the Unsub wouldn’t find him in there; but he _was_ discovered, and he put up a fight while being dragged out of the bedroom.

“So, what do you think?” Hotch asked me from the doorway.

I sighed and turned to him. “I think that we’re looking for a lone suspect, male, lost his family recently, small build.”

“Small build?”

“He had to drag the mother outside,” I referenced the trail of blood that we saw on the patio. “He couldn’t lift her up like he could with the children.”

“Small build and quiet personality based on the remorse he shows for his victims.”

I nodded an agreement. “He picked an easy target without the father because he’s acting as a surrogate of some kind.”

“Explains why he took the wedding rings off the mothers. Easiest target, too, because the door was already unlocked since Lucy, the daughter, was still in the pool when she was drowned.”

“So, he jumps the fence to the backyard, sneaks into the house when Lucy isn’t looking, and takes one of the sons hostage. He tells them that if they move or scream again, he’ll kill the son. The mother complies, but when the other son runs off, the Unsub gets spooked and tries to shoot the mom as a result, but misses. He shoots again, killing her, knocks out the son he had ahold of, and goes after the other one. The Unsub grabs him from the closet and knocks him out, too. He then goes back out to the backyard and drowns Lucy. Now that the women are dead and the boys have been taken care of, he can do whatever he wants with them.”

“No sign of sexual assault, though.”

“He didn’t need to. He lost his family, so he’s using them and their home to relive his old life. He’s pretending like they’re his family.”

Hotch scratched his face because he didn’t get a chance to shave, so it was beginning to bother him; but it was also a habit for him to do so whenever he was thinking about something concerning. “There was a case a few years back, when Elle was still on the team… This Unsub, he practically did the same exact thing… Karl Arnold was his name.”

“I remember Elle telling me about him.” I nodded. “Isn’t he in Super Max?”

“Yeah. But if we’re dealing with a copycat, he might have been in contact with whoever our Unsub is.” He dropped his hands to his side. “Call Garcia and see if she can track who he has been in contact with and if there’s anything suspicious. I’ll go tell Morgan what we know.”

I cringed internally. I still wasn’t used to answering to Morgan. I knew that it wasn’t the choice Hotch wanted to make, but it was the only way to keep the team together— just like he told me in his office on Jack’s birthday. Morgan was a good guy, and I loved him to death, but this just didn’t feel right. Things needed to go back to normal soon or I’d lose it.

As Hotch left the bedroom, I grabbed my phone and dialed Garcia.

She picked up almost immediately, “You’ve reached Penelope Garcia’s Emporium of Knowledge. What do you want to know?”

I smiled against the phone. “Good morning to you, too, gorgeous. How many cups of coffee have you had already?”

“Do you really want to know the answer to that?”

“No, I suppose not.” Telling by the way she asked, I knew that it wasn’t a good number, so it was better if I was ignorant to the truth. “Hey. can you look up an inmate at the Virginia Super Max named Karl Arnold?”

“Karl Arnold? You mean The Fox, from a couple years back?”

“The same one. We need to know who he has been in contact with because we think we might have a copycat.”

Garcia hummed along as she listened to my explanation and typed away at her computer keyboard with lightning pace. “Ah! Eureka!” She clicked something. “Woah—”

“What? What is it?”

“Apparently the prison already reached out to the FBI within the past two days about this guy because he has received two different envelopes from a secret admirer. The first one had news clippings about the murders of the Williams family, and the second one had news clippings from the Downey family—” the most recent victims— “and it came with a note that said ‘Look at what I’ve done’. Neither pieces of mail were signed by a name, it just said ‘An Admirer’ and that was it.”

“You’re a blessing and a half, Garcia. I’ll call you back if we have any more questions.”

“I’ll be awaiting your call,” she said just before hanging up.

I buried my phone in my pocket again and hurried for the backyard where the team was circled up. “We’ve got a problem,” I told them after their attention turned to me. “Karl Arnold has received two letters in regard to these cases from a secret admirer who’s taking responsibility for these murders.”

Morgan cursed under his breath as he kicked the grass. “We can’t label this a copycat yet…” he insisted. “If we do, all hell will break loose.” He looked up at all of us, “Anyone can claim anything, but it doesn’t mean that we’re dealing with a copycat just yet. We need more evidence. Hotch, you testified during Arnold’s trial— you know the most about his case and profile. I want you to go interrogate him about this admirer, see if it actually means anything.”

Hotch nodded, “I’d like to take Y/N with me.”

“Why?”

“His profile states that he’s into women that match Y/N’s description. I think that their presence will help us get more information out of him.”

“Fine,” Morgan gave in. “For now, the hypothesis of a copycat stays between all of us. I don’t want this leaking to the press because they’ll have a fucking field day with it. We keep this under wraps until we’re sure. You guys go and get back here whenever you’re absolutely positive as to whether or not this is legit. The rest of us will head to the police station to start building the profile.”

After we all nodded to each other, Hotch and I started walking back to the car. As I settled into the passenger’s seat, I picked up my phone and dialed a familiar number. It hardly even finished the first ring before she picked up.

“Hello, again, sunshine and rainbows!”

“Hello, my love,” I answered just as enthusiastically.

Hotch glanced over at me with a smile. I shrugged him off and poked his dimple to make him look back at the road.

“Garcia, can you send the case files for the Williams and Downey families’ cases to the Virginia State Maximum Security prison for us? We’re going to need everything when we’re talking to Karl Arnold.”

“You’re _going there_?” Garcia hissed over the phone. “Why? That’s not very sunshine and rainbows of you.”

“We think that he’s connected to this case. We _have_ to talk to him.”

She whined on the other end. “Okay. I’ll send them everything we have and tell them to print it out for you.”

“You’re the one and only perfect Goddess,” I complimented.

“I know,” she responded woefully. “Be safe, my loves.”

“We will.” I hung up and put my phone away.

“Sounds like she’s in a good mood,” Hotch said. I nodded. “Have you talked to JJ since she had Henry?” I shook my head. He tsked his tongue, “Come on, Y/N. Don’t you think it’s time—”

“Hotch, please…”

Yeah, I had ended up telling Hotch the truth about what happened between me and JJ in New York. After yelling at him to make him honest with me, I realized that I was being a little bit hypocritical by holding that information back from him. Ever since I told him, he was begging me to talk to JJ. Like, _constantly_. But she had just had a baby, and she was about to come back work within the next day or so, anyhow. I would talk to her then. I didn’t need to distract her while she was with her family. I also didn’t need to distract myself from the fact that Hotch and I just sorted out our own problems, and I needed to put my focus and energy into fixing us for a bit. We agreed that we were going to just forget about the past month and start over, and it was working. But dragging up drama with JJ again was just going to make things complicated for everyone.

When we arrived at the SuperMax prison, which was about two hours away from where we were, we had to turn in our weapons before going through security, then we had to meet with someone in the Warden’s office to give us the files we requested. Once we were done with reviewing amongst ourselves everything for the cases that we wanted to interrogate Arnold about, the Warden reviewed security with us. We thanked him afterwards. He sent us with a guard to walk through the prison, leading us to an elevator that would take us levels underground to where the worst of the worst were kept—where people like Karl Arnold were kept. It also happened to be the only place we were allowed to interrogate him because it was the safest place for us to do so.

“So why send the letters now when the Williams case happened over a year ago?” I asked Hotch as we stepped into the elevator. “Maybe they were communicating this whole time and he named himself before, but he doesn’t want to get caught now, so he’s keeping it simple by just saying that he’s an admirer.”

“That’s the first thing we need to find out,” Hotch answered. “This is your first time interrogating a convicted felon for research purposes, but don’t let him know that, and just pretend like it’s any normal investigation, and you’ll be fine. Do you remember Mill Creek?”

I nodded. How could I not? It was just after things between Hotch and I were getting really serious, to the point I asked him what his thoughts were on kids. But in the context of what we were about to do, the Mill Creek Killer was the first Unsub I had ever questioned on my own, and I used my looks and the fact that I was similar to his victim type in order to get information and a confession. That was why Hotch brought me along for this interrogation, too. Arnold had apparently abused the women in the families that he killed, and I fit the profile. He was likely going to spend his energy trying to seduce me, and we could use that, just like we did with the Mill Creek Killer.

“He’ll try to prove that he’s the alpha in the room by attempting to put me down. His M.O. was taking wedding rings, so the first thing he’ll do is attack me and the fact that I’m not wearing one anymore. He’ll talk about how I failed my family and that I’m a failure of a man. When he thinks that he has won the upper hand, he’ll turn his attention to you. You need to ask him all of the questions, and you need to keep him on track. If you ask, he _will_ tell you everything he did to the families, including the sexual assault of the kids.” The elevator doors opened and we stepped out together. “He’ll go into great detail, and I need you to look uncomfortable to show that you empathize with the victims.” He stopped me in my tracks by putting his hands on my shoulders. We stood in the dark, cold hallway of the underground facility, and I shivered. “He’s going to guess that you were assaulted, too. He’s going to ask you about it in order to get himself off. Do not— Y/N,” he lifted my chin with his thumb, “ _Do not_ give him the satisfaction, even if you think it will help us get information. If he wants to get off and he can’t do so through you, he’ll ask to see the crime scene photos of the Williams and Downey families. We’re going to have to show him if we’re going to be sure of whether or not this is a copycat or just another wannabe.” We kept walking towards another orange door, which opened with a loud alarm when we approached. I peered into the next hallway and noticed that this was where they kept the worst of the worst… The Jeffrey Dahmers and Charles Mansons, if you will. “Keep walking steady, look straight ahead, and don’t tense up. You’ll be fine.”

“I’ve got this, Hotch,” I insisted, patting his shoulder.

Hotch took a moment to watch me as I stepped into the hallway on my own and took brave strides past the first couple of bulletproof, reinforced glass cages. When he decided to catch up to me, he continued to explain how the next few hours were going to unfold. “When Karl starts to discuss the entirety of his cases and what he thinks about these new ones, I’ll leave the room to let you two speak freely. You’re going to have to seem interested in him—”

“Just like Mill Creek. I’ve got it, Hotch. Please.”

The next door buzzed and opened to reveal an interrogation room with a man sitting cuffed to the table. Karl Arnold looked up from his chained wrists and smiled at me and Hotch as we walked in. We kept our distance for a short moment while the door closed behind us then buzzed again to signal that we were locked inside with him.

“Agent Hotchner,” his smile brightened. “Long time, no see.” His attention turned to me and his face fell flat before he gulped, “And… Agent Greenaway…”

Just as Hotch had predicted, my presence had thrown him off his game entirely. He was likely staring at me because he was thinking of all the different ways he could abuse and murder me. And, honestly, if it was going to help us find out who killed these other two families, I’d let him fantasize about whatever he wanted as long as he never told me or tried it.

“So, we hear that you have a fan,” Hotch told Karl as he took one of the two chairs across from the inmate. I followed Hotch’s lead by taking the other seat. “Care to tell us about them?”

Karl chuckled with pursed lips. “I believe that they called themselves an admirer, not a fan.”

“Is this the first time you’ve been contacted by your admirer?” I asked, trying to draw his attention to me more since he hadn’t looked at me after saying my name.

He ignored me as he continued his conversation with Hotch. He was trying to not give up this admirer of his because it was fun for him to toy with us. “I have many _fans_ , but never an admirer before. It’s interesting that this is the first admirer.” His attention finally turned to me and I smiled slightly. “You’d be astounded at how many questions I get from fans— I keep them all in my journal— but, no, I’ve never heard from this admirer before.”

“May I see your journal?” I asked, still smiling. “If you don’t mind.” I shrugged.

Karl smiled back. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” I played along.

“Say it.”

I squinted slightly, but I didn’t quite give in to what he wanted yet; after all, we had only just met. He needed to work a little harder if he wanted to hear me say: “I want it.” He recognized the look in my eye as a challenge, and he appreciated the chase and the hunt, so he accepted my silence for now.

“Here,” he gestured to the notebook on the table, “take a look.” But he didn’t pick it up to hand to me.

Hotch and I both waited to see if he would do something, but he didn’t, so I pushed myself out of my seat a bit and leaned over the table to grab the journal. The ends of my hair fell off my shoulders and draped onto the table. Karl leaned in, too, and he screwed his eyes shut as he smelled my hair and groaned deeply. Hotch grabbed my bicep and pulled me back into my seat gently while passing me the journal. Karl glanced between the two of us, but he didn’t say anything.

“We want you to help us with these cases,” Hotch said. “We think that your admirer is copying your style— but I know you, you wouldn’t like that at all. So, I need you to tell me everything you know about this guy and why you would let him copy your work.”

“Copy my work?” He tsked his tongue, “No, no, no, Agent Hotchner. No one is _copying_ my work—”

“He’s taking the wedding rings, just like you,” I commented, trying to keep him on track.

“But maybe not for the same reason,” Hotch was careful to clarify. “We need to know why you took them and why this Unsub would take them.”

“He’s sensitive about the whole ring thing, isn’t he?” Karl laughed at me, referring to Hotch. “Even during my case, he was always upset about how I took the father’s wedding rings. He wouldn’t fucking shut up about it in court. I thought it was because he was a married man himself, but now I see that he’s not wearing one anymore, and he’s still concerned about it. Maybe we should profile him first. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

“Karl,” Hoch said gruffly. “There were eight rings, but only four families—”

“How did you come to lose your ring, Agent Hotchner?”

“That doesn’t matter—”

“Let me guess… A casualty of the job?”

I cleared my throat and shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I dropped his journal on the table and slid my hands between my crossed legs after suddenly noticing how cold my fingers were. Karl eyed me out the corner of his eye, but he still didn’t say anything about what he was taking notice of. He kept doing that. He would spot something, and he would catalog it in his mind and keep it tucked away until it was a vital piece of information for the conversation. They always say that serial killers make the best profilers, and I was finally seeing it up close with Karl Arnold.

There were a million and one reasons as to why Aaron Hotchner wasn’t wearing a ring, and the first one was indeed the fact that it was a casualty of the job. Karl hit the nail on the head with that one. But I wondered if he knew that Hotch and Haley tried to mend their relationship for the sake of Jack. I wondered if he knew that I came into the picture a little more than a year ago, and Hotch was already looking to put a new ring on his finger that matched the one he had bought for me. I wondered if he knew that Hotch could have been wearing a new ring already because I would have married Hotch even a year ago if he would have just asked. There were a million and one reasons, and yet Karl could only state the obvious… Maybe he wasn’t really much of a profiler, after all.

“I’ll help you,” he gave in, “but I'll need to see whatever evidence it is that you have hiding away in your briefcase.” Another thing he had noticed early on and was waiting to mention until the time was right.

Hotch gave push back just like he planned by saying, “No,” as sternly as he could; but I swooped in to build Karl’s trust by saying, “Sure.” Karl smiled at me as I picked up Hotch’s briefcase and pulled out the case files relating to the Williams and Downey cases. I set the files on the table and waited a moment to let Karl’s anticipation build and linger in the air, then I opened the first file, which was the most recent case, the Downey family.

Karl licked his lips and let out a quiet sigh as I started laying out all of the evidence photos from the crime scene that Garcia had sent to the prison for us to pick up. Hotch started walking Karl through everything we knew— or at least what we were willing to tell him— so that he could give us insight as to why the Unsub did what he did. It didn’t really matter why he did it if my profile was correct about his family leaving him, but Hotch wanted to hear what Karl had to say about it, so I followed his lead on the questioning, even though that wasn’t the original plan.

“The daughter was fourteen, and the sons were nine.”

“Twins,” Karl smiled, leaning back in his seat. “Those are always the best. Where were they found?”

“Buried in the backyard,” I pointed to the photo of them laying in the exhumed grave. “The mother was shot inside the house, the sons were buried alive, and the daughter was drowned.”

“Where’s the father?”

“Serving overseas. The Unsub knows this.”

Karl chuckled and nodded, “Yes. The killer knows _everything_ about the family. He has been doing his research and watching their every move to be sure that he succeeds in whatever selfish task he has.” He reached out for the photos and started sifting through them. “You have no idea how he knows that the father is gone or how he targets these families, and the how. That’s the key. The how is why Agent Hotchner was able to catch me. If you’re going to catch this killer, too, you’re going to need that missing piece.”

“You watched the families for weeks,” Hotch answered. 

“Yes, but this killer didn’t do the same thing. If he did, he would have stayed with the families for longer so that he could enjoy them. But what I don’t understand is why he didn’t separate the children—”

“Like you did?” I clarified.

“Mhm. When you separate the children from the mother, you have entire control over all of them. The mother will do whatever it takes to protect her children, and they will continue to cower wherever you put them because they’re too scared and weak to stop you. It’s a foolproof plan.” He picked up a picture of Lucy, “The others were killed distantly, which makes it feel like their blood isn’t on their hands—”

“Which was why you always strangled your victims.”

He bit his tongue at my second interruption before continuing. “But he spent his time drowning the daughter. There’s reason for that, Agent Greenaway. There always is. It’s exhilarating to feel their last breath— their life— leave their body while you hold them, knowing you’re entirely responsible for that cycle of their life.”

“For you, maybe,” Hotch shrugged, “but not for this Unsub.”

“He’s preying on the weakest link. For me, it was the father. I liked seeing how they broke down while I killed their families in front of them. Your killer, though, is going for the daughters, which means that they somehow see them as the weakest out of all of them— or maybe she’s the most favored by the fathers. He isn't killing the fathers. I spared them the grief of living without their families, but not your killer. He wants them to suffer knowing that his family is dead and that his daughter had a slow and painful death.”

Hotch’s phone started ringing, making me jump in my seat ever so slightly. I let my eyes fall shut as I tried to ignore my racing heartbeat in my chest. Hotch gave me a look that said: “You’re doing great, keep going,” and he left the interrogation room to answer the call.

“He’s killed again, hasn’t he?” Karl asked me once we were alone. I didn’t confirm nor deny anything, though I knew that it was certainly the case, otherwise Hotch wouldn’t have taken the call. “Luckily for me.” I raised a brow. “Because now we’re alone finally.”

I let out the shortest chortle imaginable before trying to move back to the cases. “You insinuated that the families don’t know the killer. Why do you think that?”

“Why did you hide your hands from me when I brought up the fact that Agent Hotchner is no longer wearing his wedding ring?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted. Trying to move back to the case again, I knew that I could have to grab his attention with something that would boost his ego, “You know, my sister told me about your case after she helped catch you. I must admit that I’ve been… _fascinated_ … ever since…” I bit my lip slightly and looked up at him through his lashes. He grinned. I got him. “Yeah, I think the way you can _control_ people is the most interesting M.O. I’ve come across.”

He chuckled and I joined him while biting my lip harder. “And now you want to know what I did to the children, don’t you?”

I tensed internally, but I maintained my cool for him and the act I was putting on. “I would love to,” I finally admitted, just like he wanted this whole time.

“I’ll tell you the truth if you tell me about why you hid your hands.”

“You first.”

“Fair enough.” He sucked in a shallow breath and licked his lips again. “I could show you exactly what I did to them.”

As he said it, flashes of memories started to pass by my eyes like watching a train race by. They were fast— too fast for me to see or understand. But they were there, and as Karl repeated that he would love to show me everything he did to them, the memories started to slow down like I were watching them from Gideon’s old film projector where they were cut up into fast, yet still obvious, frames. They slowed down and I saw that night in high school all over again… I saw him over me and I heard him asking if I liked it—

I blinked the memories away before they could continue.

He cocked a brow. “Does that… _affect_ you, Agent Greenaway? To hear a _man_ tell you that he could show you a _rough_ time?”

“No.”

He squinted. “So, then, I wonder who ruined that for you.”

“What makes you think I want to be shown a rough time in the first place, anyhow, Karl?”

“Why else would you sit here and listen to how I hurt those kids?”

“For research purposes. That’s why we’re here. You know that.”

“No,” he tsked his tongue, “it’s more than that to you…” He pondered for a moment. And then his eyes lit up as a lightbulb dinged in his mind. “You want to know if I hurt them the way he hurt you. How bad did he hurt you, Agent Greenaway?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. Don’t lie.” He shifted in his seat and I cringed at the thought of why. “Perhaps telling you my truth will jog your memory.”

We were getting somewhere, so I had to continue playing his game. _“Perhaps.”_

He grinned. “I showed them the truth. I showed them the wickedness of this world, and that no one would ever be there to protect them.”

“But you knew that you were going to kill them, anyways. What was the point of teaching them that lesson?”

“The point, Agent Greenaway, was that people like you would inevitably come around to learn my true lesson. I showed the girls that men will do anything for their own pleasure, and no man will ever do anything to them but inflict pain. The girls always looked away. They looked to their fathers and brothers for help that would never come.” He leaned in close and inhaled my scent. “Did you look away, too? Did you scream for help that would never come? Did you learn your lesson that a man will never, ever come to rescue you?”

“I never need a man to rescue me.”

“That probably sounded less cliché in your head,” he said while chuckling. “Now tell me about your hands. That was the deal.”

“You didn’t tell me what you did to the boys.”

“I didn’t do anything to them.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then you truly don’t understand me. The girls needed to learn the lesson that they were alone, and the boys needed to learn that they were just as sick as I was because they never fought to stop me. The boys always gave up first. Once I killed the children, though, the wife would break, and finally… the fathers… they wouldn’t do anything but accept their fate. It always shocked me how you can tear a man down by taking away his family.”

The door suddenly opened again. Hotch stormed in, anger plastered to his face. “Karl, I must be frank, I never thought you’d be this honest.”

“Well, only a good woman can make an honest man.” He smiled at me, and I smiled back. He looked up at Hotch. “Did she make an honest man of you, too, Agent Hotchner?” My smile faded. “I know why you hid your hands. You were self-conscious about not wearing a ring either, and that would have only made you uncomfortable if you had something to do with him not wearing one of his own anymore. You’re embarrassed that he hasn’t proposed to you yet. I wasn’t sure until I saw how protective he was of you. That was when I knew. I’ve seen it before, with the wives I killed. When I would kill her children in front of her, she’d be crying over their bodies, but he would be trying to protect _her_. He didn’t care about his children. He only cared about the one person who could bear them for him.”

“That’s what this is about,” I spoke up. “You killed those families because of your father.”

Something struck a chord with Karl, because his eyes widened in a flash, and his smirk disappeared immediately. This was the most we had gotten out of Karl physically thus far that wasn’t part of an act. Mentioning his father made him slip up.

“You hurt the girls because you regret not being able to protect someone you knew when you were younger—likely someone who had been molested by your father. He chose to protect everyone but you and the girl you couldn’t protect. That’s why you make the fathers suffer the longest… They’re surrogates for your father _and_ yourself.”

“You got all of that out of what I said?”

“Yes.”

He hummed with a smile. “You’re much better at this than your sister ever was.”

“For you, your crimes were about your fathers,” Hotch interrupted by bringing the attention back to him, “but for our Unsub, the focus is on the girls… Our Unsub is a woman.”

“Very good, Agent Hotchner.”

“I’ll tell Morgan,” I told Hotch while standing and giving him a look that said I needed a breather. He nodded. As I exited the interrogation room to call Morgan, I inhaled sharply. Inside, it felt like I couldn’t breathe in front of Karl. Now that I was alone, I could suddenly catch my breath. I shuddered. “It’s okay…” His face flashed by my thoughts. “Stop.” It didn’t again. I tried to distract myself by calling Morgan. He picked up fairly fast. “Hey.”

“Hey. How’s it going with The Fox?”

I scoffed. “You’re paying for my therapy for the next month.”

“A week.”

“Deal.”

I smiled to myself. “The good news is, we don’t think he’s connected to this case. We think that our Unsub is a woman.”

“That changes the whole profile.”

“I know.”

Morgan sighed. “Okay, we’ll get on it. Thanks, peaches.”

I laughed. “When are you ever going to run out of nicknames?”

“Never. Bye, peaches.” He hung up on me before I could protest.

I shook my head, still smiling, and I put my phone away. Turning back to the door to the interrogation room, I tried wiping my grin away. Karl was enjoying all of this too much. If I went in there, smiling about something else, he’d sniff it out like a blood hound and use it to get under mine and Hotch’s skin. Now that we were aware that he had nothing to do with these crimes that we were investigating, we could leave. We would head back to Quantico, meet up with the team to finish the profile and finish the case, and someone else at the FBI would investigate the letters that Karl Arnold had been receiving in prison. It wasn’t our job now. The amusement he got out of toying with us had finally come to an end. I was ready to get back onto the ground level.

I re-entered the interrogation room to see Karl and Hotch both standing, like they were sizing each other up. What the hell did I miss? What did Hotch say or do that could have possibly worked up The Fox? This entire time, Arnold had been relaxed because he thought that he somehow had the upper hand. But now he seemed upset.

Karl sat back in his seat, stroking his beard as he thought about what to say or do next. It took him a moment, but he found the right words. “This isn’t over, Agent Hotchner. At least not for you. He’s just getting warmed up.”

“Who is?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.

“A secret admirer.”

I sat back down across from him. “You mean _your_ admirer.”

He tsked his tongue, “No, no, no. My admirer isn’t a woman. Surely you would know that. The notes sent to me don’t reflect a female touch. Think harder, Agent Greenaway.”

“We’re done,” Hotch said. “We’ve finished what we came here for. Enjoy rotting in here, Karl.” Hotch turned for the door.

“Yes. We _are_ done. And so is _he_.” Karl picked up the note he received from his admirer, “‘Look at what I’ve done.”’

“We will find whoever sent you that without your help. Greenaway, let’s go.”

He never called me Greenaway. Ever. Most people didn’t because it was always confusing when Elle was still on the team. So, we were the two people on the team who primarily went by our first names; though there were times, like when Morgan would tease me, that people would call me Greenaway. But not Hotch. Never. He loved me for my first name. He knew that there was pain connected to my family name. I loved my family, and I would keep my last name—just as my mother did when she married Elle’s dad, then my dad. But calling me _Greenaway_ on purpose was too… It made me feel like my mother or Elle. I wasn’t them. I didn’t want to be them. I was me, and I wasn’t “Greenaway”. I was Y/N. So, the fact that he said it made me believe that it was some weird way of protecting me. My name was for him and our family, not for psychopaths like Karl Arnold.

“He’s coming for you.”

I didn’t move. “What are you talking about, Karl?”

He smiled at me. “You won’t need to go looking for him because he has already found you.”

“ _What are you talking about?_ ” I asked again, leaning in.

Hotch hurried over to the table and picked up the file with all of the evidence about the admirer. In a panic, he started flipping through all of the pages, tearing apart the envelopes to find encoded messages somewhere in them, squinting at the newspaper clippings to see if anything stuck out, and then he picked up Arnold’s journal that had all of the quotes and questions from his other fans. He looked like a madman as he went page by page, skimming every single line. And Karl started laughing. What was going on? What did Hotch realize? What did Karl know? What was I missing?

Hotch froze suddenly, staring at something in the journal that had caught his attention. I stood from my seat and looked over Hotch’s shoulder to see what he had found. My heart sank as I saw a news clipping from the night Hotch was attacked by Foyet in our home. The picture of Hotch in the article was covered by The Reaper’s mark, drawn in blood.

Oh, my god.

Karl laughed. “It’s great to see you finally squirm, Agent Hotchner. We’ve been looking forward to this, I must admit.” He laughed harder, holding his stomach as he hunched over. “He knew that you’d come.”

“We’re leaving,” Hotch whispered to me, dropping the journal on the desk, leaving the rest of the evidence, too. He didn’t even grab his briefcase.

Karl was still laughing maniacally as Hotch pressed the door button frantically. I picked up Hotch’s briefcase for him and started shoving in everything we brought as fast as I could and without care. The pages folded, crumpled, and crinkled, but I didn’t care. The door buzzed and started sliding open.

“Hotch—” I called after as he started storming down the hallway. “Hotch, wait!”

All of the inmates on either side of us were screaming and banging on the glass holding them back. They were laughing. They all knew. They were laughing and cheering because they saw that someone like _them_ was finally getting to an agent. It didn’t matter if they knew him or not. They hated the system. They hated the Bureau. Attacking even one agent of the government was a win for them. Watching Hotch storm through the corridor while trying to hold himself together was entertainment for them.

The elevator closed on me before I could jump in with Hotch. I had to wait another few minutes for it to come back so that I could get in and meet him outside. Honestly, I was praying that he wasn’t leaving without me. I knew he was panicking—as was I—but I needed him to take a breather and ground himself. He wasn’t going to be able to do this on his own.

When I reached the top floor, I raced to grab my things from security, then I ran outside. I slowed down on the pavement to look around for Hotch. My heart wrenched in my chest when I saw him hunched over the bushes on the right. He was throwing up.

“Aaron,” I called. I hurried over to him and rubbed a palm on his back to help calm him down. “Shhh…” I cooed as he threw up again. I reached to brush his hair out of his face. “Just breathe.”

He sucked in a shaky breath. “I’m trying.” He threw up again, but it was less this time, so I knew that his body was slowly giving up. He was shaking like a chihuahua, his knees were buckled, his hands were holding onto any part of me he could reach just so that he could stay up on his feet. And then he sighed. “Sorry…”

“Don’t be.”

His grip on me tightened while he stood. “It’s Foyet.”

“I know.”

“He’s back.”

“I know.”

“He’s been watching us.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to come after me.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

Hotch stared at me for a moment. “He’s going to come after you, too.”

I wiped my thumb over his forehead to clear the sweat away. “Your messes are my messes, Aaron Hotchner. Remember?” He closed his eyes and caught his breath. “We’re going to get the team, we’re going to start putting all of the pieces together, and we’re going to find this son of a bitch. He’s not going to hurt you again. I swear.”

“I don’t care about him hurting me. I don’t want him to hurt you, Jack, or Haley.”

“They’re in WITSEC,” I reminded him as I brushed his hair back. “They’re safe. We worry about us for now. We worry about finding Foyet. We worry about bringing them home again. Understood?”

He nodded. “Yeah.” He braced his hands on my shoulders. “Yeah.”

I kissed his forehead. “I love you.”

He pulled away from me and started storming towards the car. My heart sank in my chest when I realized that he wasn’t going to say it back until he knew that this was all over with…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha the next chapter's sad.


	34. WORK THE CASE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Death. Mentions of torture. Panic attack-- everything Criminal Minds.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 5 Episode 09. A few days after part thirty-three.

Hotch put his hand on my knee to stop me from bouncing it at an annoying and distracting pace. I stopped and tried to relax, even though the rest of my body still felt like a goddamn Mexican Jumping Bean. Every inch of me was shaking as nerves ran through my veins. While bouncing my leg, I had been so lost in thought about what was about to happen that I didn’t even notice that it had upset Hotch. And despite the fact that I felt the urge to start the habit up again once his hand retreated from my thigh, I used every bit of self-restraint I had to refrain from doing so. Hotch was already upset, I didn’t need to add to that. I needed to be there for him, I needed to help him however he needed. He didn’t need me to be annoying or distracting. That was valid. So, I stopped.

The door to our left opened suddenly. Hotch and I both jumped to our feet, his hand finding mine and squeezing so tight I felt my knuckles touching. I winced, but still tried to squeeze back in order to comfort him and tell him: “I’m here. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” For the past few days, he needed to hear me say it every chance we could get. “I’m here. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” And then he could breathe for a bit until he needed to hear it again. I knew that no matter what, I'd say it as many times as he needed to hear it, no matter how repetitive it got. “I’m here. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.”

Emily stepped into the hallway, her eyes glued to the floor until she saw our shoes, and she slowly glanced up. Her face was soft and sad, like she had been holding back tears for the past hour that she had been inside that conference room. If Emily looked that bad, if Emily could crack, then I was fucked. Emily was perhaps the strongest out of all of us, even if no one wanted to admit it. She, like Hotch, had been through too much in her life already to break when it came to losing someone or something. But after what I saw, after what we lost, I knew that there was no way the next hour was going to be easy for me. If Emily could crack even the slightest bit, I was going to break into a million different pieces.

Emily held the door open behind her in order to usher me in, but I took a moment to just stay frozen in place while losing all feeling in my hand because of how tight Hotch’s grip was. I felt sick already and I hadn’t even sat down inside yet— hell, I hadn’t even seen the damn room yet. How was I supposed to go in there on my own for an hour when Hotch and I hadn’t been apart for more than two minutes since it happened? How was I supposed to survive the next hour without him there to comfort me and tell me that it was going to be alright. I knew that I was supposed to be the strong one right now. I knew that he needed me to step up and be the brave one because he couldn’t do it for once— and no one blamed him. Not a single person who knew him the way we all did blamed him for what happened or how he reacted. But when was I supposed to finally break? When was it alright for me to fall apart in his arms and have him tell me that it would be alright?

“You should go,” Hotch croaked.

I shook my head. “I can’t move.”

Hotch let go of my hand and I sucked in a breath. Honestly, I would have rathered he continued to break my hand if it meant he just continued to touch me. Not feeling him anymore made me feel like I was drowning in my nerves. In the next instant, though, he turned and put his hands on my shoulders so that I would face him and look at him. I stared into his brown eyes for a minute, finding peace in how they seemed so dark and endless. Even with a black eye, a broken nose, and scratches everywhere, he was still handsome. His eyes, the way they stared right into mine, and his hands, the way they squeezed my shoulders just right, it all brought me back to Earth and grounded me.

“I’ll be right here when you’re done. It’ll be okay.”

My heart ached in my chest. Nothing felt okay. It didn’t feel like it would ever be okay again. But I trusted Hotch, and I knew that I could believe him about this, too. If he thought that things were going to be okay, even when his whole world was falling apart, then there had to be some truth to it. So, I nodded shortly, bowing my head so that I could collect my thoughts and whatever bravery was hiding deep inside of me so that I could make the first step towards the door that Emily was still politely holding open for me.

Hotch leaned in and kissed my forehead gently before releasing me. I made my move towards the door, and Emily tried shooting me a small, reassuring smile. Even though she was trying to help, it somehow only made me feel worse. I was just too worried to appreciate how she was trying to be supportive. She was a good friend, and she had been by my side when it happened, but even her kindness couldn’t distract me from the misery that was waiting behind that door.

When I stepped into the conference room, I saw Strauss sitting at the table, her back towards me. Her head was down as she wrote some notes down in a file she had in front of her. When she heard me coming in, she glanced over her shoulder to take notice that it was me, but she didn’t smile invitingly. She gestured to the seat across from her as she sat forward again. I sucked in a deep, quiet breath as I walked around the table and took the seat that had seemingly been assigned for me.

“Well, this all feels awfully familiar,” she said to herself while adjusting her glasses on her nose. I asked myself how on Earth she could make a joke about the time she wrongfully suspended me when what just happened was absolutely horrendous. “I’ll be recording this interview for the council, if you don’t mind. It was the only way I could convince them to allow me to do this in-house with everyone on your team except for Agent Hotchner.” I shrugged. Strauss took that as a sufficient answer, so she reached out for the tape recorder between us and started it. As she settled in her seat once more, she began the interview with, “Please state your name and rank for the record.”

I shifted around uncomfortably, my sweaty hands fidgeting with the hem of my pencil skirt under the table. “Y/N Greenaway, Special Agent for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia.”

How I managed to get through all of that without stuttering or throwing up everywhere, I wasn’t sure. I just wished that there were a way for Hotch to be there with me. I didn’t want to relive what happened that day, but I especially didn’t want to do it without someone— anyone— by my side. Hell, I would have even taken up the idea of being there with Rossi, if that was what it would take.

“And, how long have you been a member of the BAU?” she inquired.

“Just under two years, ma’am.”

“And you have worked under Agent Hotchner this entire time?”

Well, that was one way to phrase it, Thank you, Chief Strauss. But I shook my head regardless of the pun that was spinning through my mind. “No, ma’am, I currently report to Agent Morgan.”

“Because Agent Hotchner’s ability to lead this unit had been compromised?”

“No, ma’am. Agent Hotchner has always been able to lead our unit, and he’s very good at it. He stepped down from the position temporarily because of the injuries he suffered at the hands of George Foyet a few months ago. He is planning on returning to his position as the unit chief once he’s feeling better.”

Strauss bit the inside of her cheek. That wasn’t the answer she was hoping to hear since she was looking for every reason to finally bury Hotch’s career now, but there was no way in hell that I was going to play her little game. Just like when she tried to get rid of both of us with our original suspensions awhile ago, I wasn’t going to play nice now. Not when Hotch couldn’t afford to lose his job now, too.

“How long have you been involved with Agent Hotchner?”

“What does it matter?”

“Just answer the question, Agent Greenaway.”

My gaze hardened as I stared at her, a challenge that said: “This is stupid.” But she didn’t relent. Her question still stood, and she was waiting for an answer. If I didn’t respond, and the committee heard that I was dodging a question about my relationship with my boss, that would raise more questions than we needed. So, I gave in.

“Just under two years, ma’am. Agent Hotchner and I got involved with one another a month into my promotion into the BAU.”

“So, you were not involved beforehand?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Your promotion into the unit had nothing to do with any kind of favoritism?”

I stared at her blankly. What kind of fucking question was that? No, I didn’t fucking get promoted because Hotch liked me. Yeah, we both secretly admired one another for years, but I didn’t know that until after I joined the BAU. Hotch told me that him and Gideon decided to hire me because of my skills. It had nothing to do with anything personal. For her to insinuate otherwise was distasteful.

I bit my tongue and answered through gritted teeth, “No, ma’am. Like I said, we got involved after my promotion.” I released my tongue. “Pardon me, ma’am, but what does this have to do with what happened?”

“Agent Greenaway, the faster you stick to just answering my questions, the sooner you can go home. The more pushback you give me, the longer this will take. So, just… answer to the best of your ability.”

I bit my tongue again, this time to hold back every curse word imaginable. If I could have, I would have leapt across the table and strangled her then and there. But with a, “Yes, ma’am,” I obeyed reluctantly.

“Good.” She looked back down at her sheet of questions. “How would you describe Agent Hotchner’s behavior in and out of work?”

“With all due respect, ma’am, this isn’t about what happens behind closed doors. This isn’t about what happens after work. This isn’t about mine and Agent Hotchner’s private life. Therefore, I will not be disclosing any information about his behavior outside of work. As for at work, he is very driven— especially since George Foyet first attacked him in our home.”

“How long has Agent Hotchner been investigating George Foyet?”

“To my knowledge, Agent Hotchner was originally introduced to The Reaper case when George Foyet first started killing in the 90’s. Agent Hotchner was promoted to lead profiler for the case, but the trail went cold, and he didn’t revisit the case until George Foyet started killing again about three months ago.” My hands pulled at the bottom of my skirt as I thought about what I was going to say next. Like I said before, I didn’t want to have to relive all of this, but there we were… I had no say in the matter. “We restarted the investigation again after Karl Arnold revealed to us that George Foyet was his secret admirer.”

“Why did you stop the investigation three months ago?”

“Because we had placed George Foyet in custody after finally catching him. By the time we learned of his escape from prison, he was long gone, and we were already home. We had other cases, and there were no new leads. We couldn’t do anything until we heard from him again or decided to kill again. So, when he reached out to us through Arnold, we restarted the investigation.”

Strauss put down her pen, took off her glasses, and looked away from her questions so that she could look me right in the eye. “I’d like to hear your side of the story. What happened that day as you remember it? Keep in mind, everyone is telling us their story, so if you lie in order to protect Agent Hotchner, it could possibly result in your immediate job termination.”

This was the dreaded moment. There were no more questions, unless Strauss needed me to clarify something. All there was left to do was give every single detail, no matter how painful. The worst part about it, though, was that I couldn’t break. No matter how bad it got, I couldn’t let Strauss, of all people, see me crumble. She had been working since we first met towards getting rid of me, and if she thought that I was “too emotionally vulnerable for the position”, she would have me gone in a heartbeat.

I reached forward slightly and grabbed an empty glass and the jug of water beside it. With a shaky hand, I nervously poured myself a full cup. “Aaron and I—” I stopped myself. Just keep it together. Please. Don’t fuck this up so soon. “Agent Hotchner and I had been staying in a safe house because we were afraid that Foyet was stalking us. We didn’t think that it was safe to go home anymore, so we left and didn’t tell anyone where we were going— even the unit had no clue we moved. We still came to work, though, in case Foyet was still watching. We wanted to give the impression that everything was alright while we started looking for him again. On Thursday,” I shivered as I thought about how that day started so innocent but ended with a trip down to Hell. “On Thursday, Agent Jareau came into work to tell us that she realized something about Foyet’s medication. We had been trying to track him through all of the medications he needed to take as a result of stabbing himself back in the 90’s in order to escape police detection. Agent Hotchner had been prescribed all of the same medicines after his stabbing, so we knew what we were supposed to be looking for, the only trouble was, no one seemed to be buying what was needed, which meant that Foyet was a ghost in the wind. Agent Jareau realized that he was taking certain over the counter medications that replicated the effects of what he needed to actually help him. So, we started looking for purchases around the area that matched, and for the medications that he couldn’t replace.”

* * *

Hotch and JJ stormed into the boardroom as Morgan, Emily, Reid, and I kept searching through every red flagged receipt in the state. Reid was going faster than the rest of us, of course, but we really didn’t know what we were even looking for. We knew that Foyet needed to bulk up on all of these seemingly random over the counter medications, but so did half of Virginia, apparently. Despite the fact that Hotch, JJ, and Garcia managed to narrow down our search to a list of different pills, it didn’t help that most of them listed were popular brands, like Claritin, Motrin, TUMS, etc. Anyone with a sick kid or grandparent was stocking up on these pills, too. We needed to narrow it down again somehow if we were going to find Foyet soon.

When they came storming in, though, they seemed to have good news. Finally. They had the name of the medications that couldn’t be replicated or substituted. Tapazole, which helped treat hyperthyroidism— a disease which caused extreme weight loss as a leading symptom. It was the only one out of all of Foyet’s medication that he couldn’t get anywhere else. That was how we were going to find him. We narrowed it down further, just like we wanted, but we still needed to get more specific. There were thousands of people in the state of Virginia who took Tapazole, and Foyet was likely using an alias. If we were going to find him fast before he could move on, we needed to fine down our geographic profile.

Foyet was last seen in Fairfax County, where Hotch and I lived. That was the day he stabbed Hotch and drove him to the hospital. The last time we heard from Foyet, however, came down to the letters he sent to Karl Arnold in prison. Each letter was sent from a different city: Westminster and Fredericksburg. So, we had three locations, which meant that we could triangulate, but that meant fuck all when Foyet’s profile stated that he liked to move around a lot when he knew he was being hunted. Even if we could possibly search the epicenter of the three cities, he was probably long gone. We needed something more.

“The center,” Morgan pointed to the map on the wall, “it’s D.C., not Virginia. Why?”

“Because he’s staying close to Hotch,” Emily assumed. “He liked watching Shaunessy deteriorate because of his guilt. Now he wants to see Hotch fall apart without his fam—” Emily stopped herself when she realized what she was saying. She had just been doing her job, profiling the Unsub, looking at the M.O., narrowing down the victimology; but she crossed a line accidentally, and she immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry,” she told Hotch quietly.

He shook his head and shrugged. “I know he’s been watching us. That’s why Y/N and I moved to a safe house and I stepped down as unit chief. I wanted him to think that he was winning.”

Morgan and I glanced at each other. Neither of us knew that. Hotch told me it was for his health and because I was worried sick about him. I didn’t think for a moment that there was a larger game at play. It still didn’t matter, though. Even if Foyet really was still watching us, and Hotch wanted that, he could be long gone already.

“Eureka!” Garcia cheered as she came running in with her computer, just on time. “The goddess and her boy toy do it again!” She set her computer down on the red table and took a seat. “I narrowed the list down to 153 names.”

“That’s still a lot of people,” I said, crossing my arms. I knew that she was doing her best, and she had just broken through a huge wall for us, but we were racing against time now. 153 names was too many. There had to be a way to find Foyet on that list.

“Garcia,” Hotch said, turning to face her, “look to see if he used the name of one of his victims as his alias.”

Garcia typed away at her computer. “Nothing.”

“What about one of the cops who worked at the precinct during his arrest?”

“Nothing.”

“What about an anagram?” Spencer offered, pushing himself to his feet, using his cane to do all the work. He limped his way over to the glass board and started writing out George Foyet’s name. We all watched as he mumbled to himself, underlining certain letters, crossing out others, rearranging a few here and there. “That’s not right,” he groaned as he erased all of his work. He then started over, using The Reaper as his base. “This goes here, that goes there, this crosses out, that goes away—” And then he got it. By some miracle, that brilliant mind of his found it. “Peter Rhea.”

“You, Dr. Reid, deserve more credit,” Garcia complimented as she typed away again. “There’s a Peter Rhea in Arlington.”

We immediately set out to head to Peter Rhea’s apartment. Morgan hurried to his office to call in a SWAT, and the second he was off the phone, our team was racing to get into the cars. Hotch drove me, Morgan, and Emily, while Rossi drove JJ and Spencer in the other car. We sped through the cities with the lights and sirens on until we reached the block over from the apartment. We split up and parked on opposite ends of the road, staying hidden around a corner and under a tree.

Morgan ordered us to stay in the cars while the SWAT team set up a surveillance system to see if Foyet was inside. He wanted to play this safe and smart since he was still getting a lot of heat from Strauss and the Director while being the new unit chief. We couldn’t go storming into some random guy’s apartment without probable cause, we all knew that, but if the call were up to Hotch, we would have already been knocking at the door. Morgan, on the other hand, wanted to wait and see if Foyet would do anything while the SWAT team got in place.

“Is he ready?” Morgan asked into his comm.

The plan was that they were going to send in an agent undercover as a plumber to see if they could get someone to open up the door. If Foyet opened the door, we could go in and continue with making the arrest. If Foyet didn’t open up, the agent was going to use a micro-wire camera to peek under the door to see if there was anything suspicious enough to give us the reasonable cause we were looking for.

I looked out the window to see the agent walking across the street with his toolbox in hand. He walked casually into the building, which was when we lost sight of him. All there was to do now was wait to hear if we could move in or see if he would connect the camera’s live feed to our tablet in the car. So, we watched as he made his way up to the apartment we suspected that Foyet was in. Still, without cause, we had to wait. But we were all getting anxious, understandably.

He first knocked on the door, waiting to see if there was a response. If Foyet opened the door, we were going to make our move. If someone besides Foyet opened the door, we would have to wait to see if there was anything incriminating of if we just got the wrong place. If no one would open up, then we’d have to use the camera. A minute passed. No one answered, even when he tried knocking again, so Morgan gave the go ahead to use the camera.

The camera snuck under the door, and we watched on the tablet in Morgan’s lap. My heart was racing in my chest. My hope was that the son of a bitch was cowering inside, making it easy for us to capture him. This time, we weren’t going to give him a chance to escape. This time, he wasn’t going to hurt Hotch.

“Morgan, look,” I pressed the tip of my index finger against the screen. “There’s unfinished food next to that laptop. The food, the unopened mail, the clean apartment. This has to be his place, and he left in a hurry.”

“He’s not fucking there?” Hotch inquired angrily.

“Move in!” Morgan demanded into his comm. The team jumped out of the cars we arrived in, all of us unholstering our weapons as we closed the doors. The SWAT team was already moving across the street in formation. 

We stormed the building, racing up the staircase together in a single file line since running was faster than waiting for the elevator. When we arrived on Foyet’s floor, Morgan led the way down the hallway, and slowed to a stop in front of the apartment. Morgan kicked the door down before running in first. Emily, Rossi, and Hotch were all right behind him, with me and JJ keeping watch in the hallway. The SWAT team was still clearing the rest of the building, and it would take a while to meet us all the way at the top floor, so we needed to search the place as fast as possible.

Morgan and I moved into the bedroom on the left while the team looked around the main room. There was a half-packed suitcase on the bed, clothes everywhere, and a safe hidden in the open closet with a stash of guns inside. He hadn’t even bothered to lock up the guns when he left, which meant that he knew he wasn’t coming back. Foyet knew we were coming, and he ran. Shit.

I lowered my weapon as I let out an angry sigh. We wasted so much time just sitting in the car. I loved and respected Morgan, and I knew that I trusted him with my life out in the field, but he made the wrong call by telling us to wait in the car. If we had gotten into the place sooner, we would have already seen this and been tracking Foyet to his next location. Now we were too far behind.

“What’s going on out here?” Morgan asked, stepping back into the main room.

The team was huddled around the computer that Foyet left, watching nervously as something beeped on the screen. I followed Morgan and leaned on my tiptoes to see the computer over everyone’s shoulders. Foyet brought what he needed to D.C., and he only took what he needed when he left this apartment in a hurry. Everything else was evidence for us, he knew that. Since he knew we were coming, he had a safety system in place to make sure we wouldn’t get our hands on anything valuable, which included the contents of his laptop. The team looked nervous because whatever was on there, it was being deleted by a program he created.

JJ was already calling Garcia to see if she could stop it and save everything that was already gone. Like the goddess she was, Garcia already hacked into the computer by the time Morgan and I were aware that this was happening. She managed to stop the program that was deleting everything just as I leaned back on my feet and stepped towards Hotch’s side to get a better look at the screen.

Hotch had his hands clasped together in front of him, his fingers picking at his cuticles nervously. He was upset that Foyet wasn’t there, that he had escaped us again, and that we still didn’t have our family back yet. We had hoped that this lead would end with Foyet in handcuffs again, and Hotch would immediately get to call Sam to tell him that Haley and Jack could come home. Both of us had hoped that this lead would have ended with us holding Jack in our arms by diner time, but the world wasn’t kind to us like that. Foyet had escaped us countless times before, and this was just another one of those cases.

“Garcia, wait—” Morgan insisted. I looked back over at the computer to see that Garcia had paused her new program which was retrieving everything Foyet already deleted. She had been running through hundreds of different pictures, just trying to collect them all, but something caught Morgan’s eye. “Hotch, isn’t that—”

Hotch grabbed his phone from his pocket and flipped it open. “Yeah, that’s the U.S. Marshal assigned to my family.”

My heart sank in my chest as Garcia continued running the program. Foyet had hundreds— if not  _ thousands _ of photos of Sam. This whole time, Hotch and I had been worried that Foyet was following us in the hopes of getting to Haley and Jack, but he was really trying to get to them through Sam, the only one who knew where they were. Sam had probably visited them on multiple occasions to make sure they were doing okay, since that was the unofficial deal he made with Hotch. Every time Sam went to visit them, Foyet was there. He knew where they were. He knew how to get to them— via Sam.

“He’s not picking up,” Hotch informed us before trying Sam’s number again, this time to leave a message. “Sam, it’s Aaron. We found Foyet’s apartment, but he has surveillance of you. He might know where they are. I need you to call me for a meet location, or we’re on our way to you.”

Morgan pulled his phone out, too. “We need another SWAT team at Sam’s place.”

“That’ll take at least thirty minutes,” I said.

“It’s the best chance we got.”

“Aaron!” I called after him while he stormed out of the apartment. I looked to Morgan for his next orders. “We need to go to Sam’s house. Now.”

Morgan nodded, “Go. Reid will stay here with SWAT, the rest of us will catch up.”

I didn’t spend another second in that apartment. In an instant, I was on my toes, chasing after Hotch, jumping down the steps of the apartment building, trying to meet him at the car before he could drive off. As I pushed through the front doors in the lobby, I saw Hotch getting into the driver’s seat of the closest car we brought. Hotch spotted me running across the road as he started up the car. He waited until I was in the car to go, the door barely even closed yet, my seatbelt not on.

Hotch was driving like a mad man. He was taking the turns too fast, he was weaving around cars, he was racing through intersections without looking to see if it was safe. I genuinely feared that we were going to die before we could even get to Sam’s house. What help would we be then? Hotch could afford to at least slow down a bit, right?

I grabbed the handle on the ceiling as we took another sharp turn a little too fast. Hotch tried to regain control of the car as he straightened out the steering wheel before the car would overturn. I sighed with relief quietly when we didn’t die, then kept driving towards Sam’s neighborhood.

When we arrived at Sam’s house, Hotch drove straight up onto the curb and jumped out once the car was in park, but didn’t wait to turn off the car. I followed suit, both of us grabbing our guns as we ran up the sidewalk in the middle of the front yard. My eyes grew wide as I silently took notice of the unlocked front door that was half open. Hotch noticed, too, but nothing needed to be said about it. The plan was to do what we always did. Go in together, clear the house, find Sam. Most importantly, just pray that Sam was okay.

Hotch looked over at me. “You got me?” he whispered.

I nodded.

He faced the door and took in a deep breath before pushing it open and running in. I followed closely. Both of our weapons were raised, our fingers on the triggers. We hurried inside to search the place for any sign of Sam. Hotch checked the left side of the living room, while I went to the right. The backdoor was open, just as the front door had been.

I immediately holstered my weapon as I walked around the couch in the middle of the room to find Sam laying on the floor, bleeding out. I called Hotch’s name and he came rushing over. We both fell to our knees beside him and I started to put pressure on his wounds. Sam had been shot in the chest twice, each leg once, and in the foot a single time. I started by pressing down on his chest, and Hotch helped by holding the thigh wounds.

“Medic!” Hotch yelled to the approaching ambulance outside. “Medic, please!”

Sam groaned and opened his swollen eyes as far as he could. Foyet had beaten up his face and cut off three fingers. “I’m sorry, Hotch…” he croaked before coughing up some blood.

Hotch leaned over him to make sure they could make eye contact. “It’s alright, Sam. It’s alright. You need to tell me if he knows where Jack and Haley are.” He was being so calm. Oddly calm.

“I didn’t… I couldn’t… I’m sorry…”

“Sam, look at me,” Hotch begged. “Does he know where Haley and Jack are? What’s her phone number or address?”

“It won’t matter…”

“What does that mean?” I questioned.

“It won’t matter…” he repeated, his eyes falling shut.

I looked up at Hotch. “It’s the shock.”

I recognized his inability to speak because of how similar it was to how Hotch was after the car bombing in New York. Hotch couldn’t form complete sentences, and he always kept repeating the same thing over and over, even when I would try to ask him questions. Sam was the same way, and I couldn’t blame him. Foyet had really done a number on him. He was bleeding out fast, and I prayed that the medics would arrive soon.

“Sam, please, just tell me if he knows where our family is,” Hotch said, still calm and collected as I had ever seen him.

Sam’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, but fell shut again. He was losing consciousness. There was no way he would be able to tell us anything about where Foyet went or how to find Haley and Jack. Even if he got to the hospital before bleeding out, there was no telling when he would wake up in order to tell us where Haley and Jack were. We needed answers now, but the only person who could give them to us was unable to say anything at all.

A pair of hands grabbed my shoulders. Morgan pulled me onto my feet and out of the way as the EMTs hurried into the house with a medical bag and a stretcher. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to cover the worry and shock that was certainly plastered to my face. Morgan noticed my bloody hands, so he grabbed a wipe or handkerchief of some kind from his pocket. He took my hands in his while I still stared down at Sam and the medics doing everything they could to help him. I felt Morgan wipe the blood off my hands, and I could vaguely hear him talking to me, but I didn’t say anything or even more. Sam was our last chance. He was our last link. He knew where they were, and now Foyet knew.

Hotch looked as solid as a rock, not reacting a single bit. He just calmly stood and moved to the side while we all watched the EMTs get to work. They started by covering up the bullet wounds, then rolling him onto a stretcher, and as they wheeled him out, they stuck an IV in his arm. Hotch was right next to the stretcher as they rolled Sam out of the house, onto the sidewalk, and up to the ambulance waiting in the road. Morgan and I were a few steps behind, watching as the EMTs lifted Sam into the back of the vehicle. I noticed that Hotch wasn’t waiting back with us, though. No, he was all the way up there with them—

“Aaron!” I yelled, running towards the ambulance.

He was climbing in with the EMTs and was already working on closing the door when he heard me. He stopped for a fleeting moment. “Stay here! I love you!” Then he closed the door.

The ambulance immediately sped off the second the door was shut. Sirens shook the neighborhood, and the lights nearly blinded me as my eyes fogged over. I felt sick and confused again, just like I had at the hospital in New York. I tried to close my eyes, swallow hard to keep myself from vomiting, and focus on finding Jack alive. Hotch left to talk with Sam in the ambulance. That was a good move. It was the right move. But not knowing what was going on and not being able to do anything made the panic that had been building in my chest since New York come flooding back into my mind, heart, and lungs.

My ears started ringing just as my heart rate sped up and my lungs started to give out. I cursed under my breath as I hid my face in my hands and sat down before I could pass out and likely hit my head on the concrete. I tried to focus on Jack and our favorite dinosaur that was sitting at home, waiting for him to come back and play with it. I tried to not think about the bile rising in my closing throat or the way my whole body was shaking like I was standing in the middle of a world ending type of earthquake.

I gasped for breath and laid on my back, the sun’s light casting through my eyelids. It was so nice and warm out. It didn’t feel like the kind of day that was meant for this. But, then again, when was it ever the right kind of day for something like this?

“Morgan...” I croaked. “Morgan, it’s happening again.”

I could feel him crouching down beside me, putting one hand on my hair and one on my shoulder. As he tried to talk to me, it just sounded like he was screaming at me from underwater. Everything was so muffled, and nothing made sense. The ringing in my ears returned two-fold this time and I winced. Trying to balance everything— my breathing, my heart rate, my ears, my sick stomach, the shaking, the blurry sight, and the racing thoughts— all at once was too overwhelming for me. This didn’t feel like New York. It felt ten times worse than that.

“Call Hotch!” I heard Morgan yell. That was the only clear thing to me. “Call him now!” 

In a few moments following that, I felt a phone press against my ear. “Y/N?” It was Hotch. He was still in the ambulance. “Y/N? Are you there?”

“I’m here…” I whispered, opening my eyes. The feeling of needing to vomit was slowly subsiding. “Has Sam said anything?”

“That doesn’t matter right now. Just talk to me.”

I sucked in a deep breath, held it, and slowly let it out— just like the doctor in New York taught me. Slow and easy breaths. “Did he tell you where to find Jack and Haley?”

“No.” He was holding something back, I could tell.

“Foyet?”

“Took Sam’s phone, called Haley, and impersonated a U.S. Marshal.”

I pushed myself upright and took the phone from Morgan. Deep breath in, hold it, then let it out. The ringing in my ears was gone and I could hear everything around me again. “Did she tell him where they are?”

“No. She’s meeting him somewhere.”

“Do you know where?”

“Y/N, stop it. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, standing up. Morgan held his arms out like he was ready to catch me at any second. “Tell me everything Sam said. Please.”

Hotch sighed on the other end of the call, likely debating if he should tell me or hold his tongue. Someone must have told him what happened, which was why he wasn’t telling me anything, and he was avoiding talking about Foyet in order to get me talking. I promised him ever since New York that this wouldn’t happen again, and just when it finally does, he was too far away to help me.

“He told her that she was compromised and that we’re dead,” he answered. “He told her to throw away her phone and buy a disposable.”

“That son of a bitch…” I mumbled under my breath.

I gave Morgan a worried look and he called the team over. I took the phone away from my ear and put the call on speaker. My shaking was nearly gone. I felt like a million bucks again. Funny how those things work sometimes, right? Or maybe it was just that I had suppressed it all again and I was another ticking time bomb. Honestly, if that were the case, I was just hoping that I’d wait to blow up again until after we found Jack and Haley safe and alive.

“Foyet posed as a Marshal and called Haley from Sam’s phone,” I caught the team up to speed.

Emily was cocking a brow at me like she didn’t understand how I could go from laying on the sidewalk while hyperventilating to standing upright and talking about the case without any hesitancy. I tried to avoid eye contact with her so as to not be alarmed by her worry for me. 

“He still has the phone,” Hotch continued explaining for me. “He scared Haley into thinking that she’s alone and in danger. She trusts him now because the call came from a number she knew and he gave her the promise of safety. We have to find him.”

JJ pulled out her phone, “Garcia, we need you to locate Sam Kassmeyer’s phone ASAP.” She stayed on the line as Garcia worked. “Fairfax County,” she repeated for us.

“Send the approximate coordinates to my phone,” Hotch demanded before hanging up.

“Wait—” Emily tried to catch him, but he was already gone. “Garcia, is that phone still on?”

JJ, with the phone still pressed to her ear, nodded to Emily.

“It’s a trap,” Emily said.

“Emily, call the U.S. Marshals. See if they can reach Haley,” Morgan ordered as we all headed back to the cars. “It’ll be a tight fit.”

Emily, Rossi, and JJ made it work, though, as the three of them squished hip to hip in the back seat. Emily was already on the phone with the U.S. Marshal Service while JJ was still listening to Garcia as she tried to get more information about Foyer and Hotch. Emily sighed, hanging up the call she was on after having a back to back conversation while Morgan started speeding out of the neighborhood.

“Haley’s gone. They don’t know where she is,” Emily informed us.

“Guys,” JJ said, putting her call with Garcia on speaker. “Hotch is calling Sam’s phone.”

“Foyet has it, though—” I said before realizing what that meant. “Garcia, can you connect us to it?”

“Already done,” Garcia said.

“Agent Hotchner,” Foyet welcomed with a bright voice. “How are you?”

“If you touch them, I swear to—”

“What? Do you want me to be gentle, like I was with you?”

My blood ran cold. Morgan glanced over at me to read my face before turning back to watch the road. Hotch and told me what Foyet did to him, but there were obviously some details he refused to tell me, like how he was tortured. As far as I was aware, Foyet had broken into our house, stabbed Hotch a series of times after they had a fight, and then he dropped Hotch off at the hospital. He didn’t tell me anything about Foyet taking his time to torture him, though, I guessed I should have known that the Reaper wasn’t just going to let Aaron Hotchner get off that easily.

“What took you so long?” Foyet chuckled. “I was beginning to think this piece of shit phone was dead or something.” There was silence on the call for a moment. “Why are you so quiet, Aaron? You usually lash out when you’re frustrated. Remember what happened when I mentioned dear old Y/N that night? You threw a goddamn glass bottle at my head. Where’s the fight, Aaron?”

“I’m not frustrated. You’re just predictable.”

“Is that so?”

“You didn’t know where Haley was, so you tricked her into coming to you. That’s not like you either, George. Where’s the creativity?” He was pushing back against Foyet to prove that he wasn’t going to be rattled.

“You make me sound  _ lazy _ , Aaron.”

“No. I just know you’re smarter than this. I mean, you  _ did _ kill your parents when you were nine—”

“—They died in a car crash—”

“—That  _ you caused _ and couldn’t take credit for. Is that your biggest regret? Hmm? Not being able to brag about your greatest accomplishment?”

“That’s not my greatest accomplishment,” Foyet snickered.

“No? Then what is? Getting away with all of the people you murdered in cold blood?”

“Have you stopped to ask yourself that perhaps my greatest accomplishment has yet to come? In fact, I’m staring at it right now. She’s gorgeous, Aaron. I get why you married her. But I think blonde suited her better than the brunette look. Oh— and here comes the little man! Look at how big he is now! Wow. You know, Aaron, I actually admire one thing about you. Do you care to know what it is?” Hotch didn’t say anything still, so Foyet continued. “Most couples, when they get a divorce and there’s a kid involved, they fight for custody, but not you and Haley. You two managed to work it out in a way that made you both happy. She got him nearly all the time, and you got to see him when you and your whore weren’t away.” He tsked his tongue, “Aw. Look at his little superhero t-shirt. Adorable.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and gestured for Morgan to go faster.

“Hey, you know what, that reminds me…” Foyet groaned like he was stretching. “When I called Haley earlier and told her that you and Y/N were dead, she said that Jack wanted me to grab a toy dinosaur from your place— mentioned something about how it’s Jack’s favorite toy and he can’t bear to move away again without it. I hope you don’t mind, but I went by your guys’ place and grabbed it for him.”

A whimper left my throat as I failed to choke back a sob. Our favorite dinosaur… The one Jack gave me before leaving. The one I had been thinking about earlier to help calm me down. Foyet went back to our house just to grab it. It was going to be the last thing Jack would see.

Rossi reached between mine and Morgan’s front seats and grabbed my shoulder to comfort me. I put my hand over his after wiping away a tear from my cheek.

Another phone on Foyet’s end of the call started ringing. “Oh, that’ll be Haley. Hold, please, while I turn you off speaker and answer her call,” Foyet said. We heard the beep of him picking up the other call and putting it on speaker for us to listen. “Mrs. Hotchner, are you safe?”

“Yes. I’m here,” Haley said.

I squeezed Rossi’s hand.

“Good. Just open the gate and I’ll drive in,” Foyet said to her.

“Okay. Thanks.” She hung up the phone as fast as she could.

“Aaron, you still there?” Foyet asked. “Listen, I gotta go. I’ll say goodbye to the little man for ya.”

“You motherfuc—” Hotch began, but the call ended.

“Garcia?” JJ asked into her phone.

“I couldn’t get an address,” she whispered in defeat. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Wait…” I said, letting go of Rossi’s hand. “Wait, wait, wait. Garcia, Sam’s phone is government issued, which means that they can falsify the call’s location. Is it possible that he’s not even in the middle of Fairfax?”

“It’s possible, I suppose, but the signal was bouncing from three towers around that county. He could be anywhere inside it or just outside of it.”

Hotch and I lived just outside of Fairfax County. He hadn’t moved out after Haley left him, and we certainly didn’t move when I moved in with him. We wanted Jack to have some normalcy in his life, so staying in his childhood home was the best choice. There was a gate in order to get into the neighborhood. Foyet mentioned that Haley needed to open a gate.

We were speeding down the highway towards the North side of Fairfax County, but Hotch and I lived East of the county, just barely outside of the county line. Hotch was already close by to the house after leaving the hospital, but we were at least fifteen minutes away. We wouldn’t get there in time, but Hotch could.

I scrambled for my phone and dialed Hotch’s number again and he answered. “Hotch, he’s at the house! He told Haley to meet him at our house!”

Foyet had tried to throw us off by mentioning the dinosaur, making us believe that he broke into our house in order to give Jack the toy at a separate location; when, in reality, Jack was already at the house and probably already found the dinosaur sitting prominently on the table by the front door.

“I know, Y/N. I know.”

Morgan made an abrupt U-turn, and we started speeding back towards South-East to meet Hotch at the house.

“Y/N?” he asked quietly on the other end. I hummed a tune that asked: “What?” and he followed with, “I love you.”

“Hotch, why are you—”

“If something happens… I love you.”

“Aaron, stop it,” I begged, shaking my head.

It sounded like he was saying goodbye, and it was scaring me. Why did he think that something was going to happen?  _ Nothing _ was going to happen. Nothing. He was going to be fine. He was going to get there before Foyet could lay a finger on Haley or Jack. Everything was going to be alright.

“Please say it back. Please.”

“Aaron—”

“Please.”

I took in a deep breath and blinked away the tears that were welling in my eyes. “I love you, Aaron.”

“Guys, Foyet’s calling Hotch again,” Garcia informed us.

“I love you,” we both repeated to each other one last time before he hung up and answered Foyet’s call.

Garcia connected us again so that we could listen.

“Aaron?” Haley asked into their new call. “You’re okay?”

There was a beat of silence.

“I’m fine,” he responded.

“But… He said that…” Haley gasped quietly. “Oh…”

“He can hear us, can’t he?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Haley, don’t show him any weakness, alright? He feeds off of it.”

“Oh, come on, Aaron,” Foyet groaned out of annoyance. “Chop, chop, tell your wife what this is really all about. Come on. Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Aaron?” Haley questioned, pressing him for answers.

“Don’t listen to him,” Hotch begged, “he’s just trying to scare you.”

“Well, she  _ should _ be scared, Aaron! She gonna D-I-E because you refused to listen to me!”

I looked at Morgan for any kind of consolation. He looked back at me with pressed in eyebrows and sad eyes. “We’re at least twelve minutes away,” he told me quietly.

“Ignore him, Haley!” Hotch yelled.

“Since he won’t tell you,” Foyet sighed, “I guess I will. All he had to do to save you and your son was stop looking for me.”

Haley sniffled, “Aaron, what is he talking about?”

Hotch was quiet for a long moment.

I wondered what he was going to say. Was he going to tell Haley the truth? That George Foyet had told Hotch that he would stop killing if we just stopped chasing after him— if we just put the case away until he would eventually die, then this whole mess wouldn’t be happening. Foyet proposed the deal that night in the hotel room, and Hotch practically told him to go fuck himself. It made sense why Foyet wasn’t exactly happy, and was thus trying to take it out on our family. The psychology of it made sense, but I just wanted this nightmare to end. We couldn’t go back in time and tell Foyet that we would agree to his terms, and Foyet knew it. He knew that this was Hotch’s fault, and he wanted everyone to know it. He wanted Hotch to know it most of all.

“Tell Jack I need him to work the case,” Hotch cried into the phone.

My face fell into my hands as I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. Hotch had tried so hard all day to stay strong for himself, for me, for the team, and for Jack and Haley. He hadn’t broken once, even when I was a wreck. But Foyet had Haley and Jack. He had our son and there was nothing we could do. We were all helpless. But there was one thing Hotch could tell Jack to do that could save his life. One simple request that seemed so innocent to Foyet and everyone else— but Jack, Hotch, and I knew the truth. Telling Jack to go work the case was the last thing we could possibly do to save him. If that didn’t work, it was over. Foyet would kill both of them and we would lose.

“Hi, Daddy,” Jack said into the phone.

I let out a sob. Morgan and Rossi both put a comforting hand on me, but it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to help me. Jack sounded so happy, so oblivious to what was going on. And as I hid my face in my hands, I couldn’t help but see images of him lying dead on our carpet. We were going to find him like that… Our baby Jack.

“Hi, buddy,” Hotch sniffled.

“Is Y/N with you?”

“No… They’re coming, though. We’re both trying to get home to you as fast as we can.”

“Is George a bad guy?”

“Yes… Yes, he is, Jack. Listen, buddy, I need you on this case with me. Do you understand? I need you to go work on your superhero homework because Y/N and I need your help with this case. Does that sound good, kiddo?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

“Now give your mom a Superman hug, Jack.”

There was silence on both ends of the call for a minute, then I could hear Haley whispering to Jack that she loved him more than anything in the world and he complained that she was hugging him too tight. She apologized to him through a half sob.

“Why are you sad, mommy?” Jack questioned.

“Oh… I just love you so much,” Haley answered as bravely as she could. “Now go work the case for your dad, alright?” Jack hummed an agreement, then I could hear his little feet running off.

“I’ll be right up, Jackie boy!” Foyet called after him.

“Is he gone?” Hotch asked.

“Yes,” Haley cried.

“You’re so strong, Haley. You’re stronger than I ever was. You’re going to be alright. I’m so close. I promise.”

“Aaron…” she whispered into the phone. I could finally hear up close just how scared she was. Her voice sputtered, she was whimpering quietly, and her breath kept hitching as she tried to not sob.

“I know you didn’t sign on for this. I’m so sorry for everything, Haley. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Aaron,” she repeated like she was trying to tell him something important. He stayed quiet to listen. “Promise me that you’ll tell Jack how we met and how you used to make me laugh… He deserves to know that we were happy at one point. Promise me that. Please…”

“I promise…” he whispered in defeat. “I promise, Haley. I love you. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Haley… I promise…”

And then there were three gunshots.

I shook and cried, Rossi’s grip tightened around my shoulder, and Morgan picked up my hand to hold it.

Three shots. Three. They rang in my ears. I counted each one. One after the other. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. My ears were ringing again. I didn’t even realize that the call had ended.

I heard Emily ask how far we were, and Morgan quietly said that we were still ten minutes out, if we were lucky. Ten minutes for Foyet to find Jack. Ten minutes for him to wait for Hotch to get home. Ten minutes for him to kill my family. Ten minutes to take everything from me. Ten minutes. If we were lucky.  _ If _ . If we were lucky, we’d get there and maybe only Haley and Jack would be dead. Lucky. That was considered lucky. If we weren’t, I’d walk into our home to find all three of them dead and Foyet gone.

There was nothing we could do. Nothing but to wait the ten agonizingly long minutes. Every second felt like an hour. Every breath I needed to take felt impossible to reach, like a thousand pounds were resting on my chest. And yet, the world around us didn’t seem to notice. Cars on the road moved to the side to let us through, but then they continued on behind us. The trees were still, and the birds were flying high in the sky, kids were riding their bikes on the sidewalks, people were waiting for the public transport buses; and not one of them knew what was really going on. No one knew. No one cared. Just ten minutes of me staring out the window, watching all of those people living their normal, happy lives. And I wished that I were in their shoes.

As we pulled into the neighborhood, I sat up straight, wiped my eyes, and adjusted my vest. I let go of Morgan’s hand and shrugged off Rossi’s touch on my shoulder. I pulled out my gun and checked the magazine and the chamber while telling Morgan that I’d lead us inside quietly. No one argued. They just seemed as shell shocked as I should have still been, but I couldn’t afford to let my guard down when my family was in danger in our house.

Hotch’s car was parked on the grass in front of the house like he sped up as close to the door as he could get before jumping out and running in. The front door was wide open, but all of the blinds inside were closed. Someone had set the house up, and that someone was probably Foyet. He was toying with us. He had been planning this for so long while stalking us, and now that the day had finally come, he was probably sitting inside, smiling and waiting.

As the team got out, the EMTs and SWAT team also arrived. Morgan went over to talk with them about the plan for proceeding inside, while the rest of the team had my back going into the house. We quietly ran up the front lawn, and Rossi pushed the front door open carefully to make sure it wouldn’t break or hit the wall. Our favorite dinosaur wasn’t on the front table as I had left it, which meant that Jack had it with him in his spot, or Foyet took it. I didn’t want to assume anything past that while I needed to focus on finding them all alive.

The house was dark with no lights on and the curtains drawn, so we all pulled out our flashlights. I crossed my wrists over each other, one hand holding my gun up, the other pointing my flashlight forward to help me navigate my way around my own home. I gestured to Rossi and JJ to check upstairs while Emily followed me as we proceeded quietly throughout the first floor.

There was nothing in the living room that was out of place. Not a single thing. Even all of Jack’s toys were put away, even though Hotch and I had left them out on purpose to make it feel like he was still around. Someone had cleaned up, maybe it was Foyet, or maybe it was Haley. Either way, the room was still empty, so we moved on.

The door to the kitchen was wide open. Inside, one of the drawers was pulled out all the way. I checked the inside of it and noticed that our spare flashlight was gone. Hotch had come through there, too. I checked the knife rack, taking note that all of the knives were still there. No sign of a struggle in the kitchen. So we moved on again.

We worked our way into the dining room, and that was where we found the first evidence of a struggle. The table was broken like someone had been thrown onto it and it collapsed under their weight. Then just beyond the wreckage of the table, we saw the first trace of blood on the carpet. I pointed at it for Emily, and she nodded to tell me that she saw it, too. The trail led to the stairs, which was where Rossi and JJ were already looking around— and truth be told, since we hadn’t found Haley, Hotch, or Jack downstairs, it meant that they were upstairs, and I didn’t want to be the one to find them. I was fine with waiting downstairs for Rossi or JJ to tell me the bad news.

“Pssst,” Emily drew my attention to the window that was facing the backyard.

There was something going on outside, but we weren’t sure what. It could have just been the neighbors making some noise, or maybe the SWAT team was surrounding the house to make sure Foyet wouldn’t get away. Whatever it was, we needed to know, so I walked over to the window and carefully pulled the drape to the side to take a look. I peeked into the backyard for just a moment before realizing what was going on. Without warning, I dropped the drape and dashed for the backdoor, which was open, too. Emily chased after me, not sure what I saw, but still decided to follow my lead.

I holstered my weapon as I ran out past the patio and onto the grass. “Hotch!” I yelled at him, sliding to my knees. He was straddling Foyet’s torso while continuously beating him. Foyet was unrecognizable behind the blood and bashed in face, yet Hotch kept fucking going. “Aaron, stop!” I grabbed his arm before he could land another punch and pulled him off of Foyet. He sobbed as he fell back into my chest, and I wrapped my arms around him to make sure he wouldn’t try to get back on Foyet to keep going. “Aaron, it’s me! He’s dead! He’s dead! Stop!” He slumped against my body, giving up, and sobbed even harder. “Baby…” I cried. “Where’s Jack?”

He stopped crying at the realization that he hadn’t gone to find Jack yet. He wiggled himself out of my hold and scrambled desperately to his feet, nearly tripping over himself as he did so. I pushed myself off the ground, too, and chased after him into the house. Emily didn’t follow us, though. She stayed on the porch, just staring at Foyet’s body and all the damage Hotch had done. Hotch was capable of so much, but no one ever truly saw the extent of what he could do when he was angry. While it didn’t exactly surprise me how Foyet ended up, I could understand why Emily was so shocked and speechless.

We ran through the dining room, jumped over the pool of blood on the carpet, and hurried up the stairs. I noticed that the corner wall on the staircase had a dent at the bottom, like someone had smashed their head into it during a struggle. There was blood all over the stairs, and the banister, and the walls. So much blood… But we kept running. I used the railing to pull myself up faster, skipping as many steps as I could at a time without accidentally running into Hotch.

When we reached the top of the steps, we turned to the left and ran into the office together. Hotch’s desk was under the window that looked over the driveway on the side of the house, and my desk was on the wall to the left of that. Between our desks was a large wooden chest with a leather padded seat on the top.

Hotch hesitated in front of it, not sure if he wanted to look inside. But I didn’t wait. I had to know. Did Foyet kill my little man? Did he kill the only innocent thing in our lives? Did he win?

I knelt down and slowly opened the lid. A sudden sigh of relief left me before I started to cry again. Jack was laying down in the chest, messing with the power switch of his Spider-Man themed flashlight in one hand, and playing with our favorite dinosaur with the other. As I opened the lid all the way and rested it against the wall, Jack sat up and I immediately hugged him tight. I let out a painful cry as he nuzzled his head against my shoulder and hugged me back with his Superman strength. I lifted him out of the chest and cradled him close.

“I worked the case with you, Dad,” Jack said to Hotch.

Hotch crouched down beside me and pushed back some of Jack’s blonde hair out of his face. “You did a great job, buddy.” Hotch kissed my temple for a long moment.

Jack unwrapped his arms from our hug, and so did I. “Are you okay, Dad?”

Hotch nodded, “I’m okay. I want you to go outside with Ms. Jareau, okay?”

I looked over to the door to see JJ and Rossi standing there. No Haley with them.

One. Two. Three.

The gunshots rang in my ears again as Jack pried himself away from me and ran into JJ’s arms. JJ caught him with a forced smile and immediately carried him downstairs, making sure that he couldn’t look down the hallway to our bedroom. Rossi stayed in the doorway to make sure that we were okay, though.

Hotch fell from his knees onto his hip and leaned into my side as he started sobbing again. I turned and sat with him on the floor so that I could hold him better. He hid his bloody face in my shoulder, screaming into my shirt. My hands went up to the back of his head and held him close. My fingers curled in his hair as I let out another sob with him.

Jack was safe, but at what cost? Haley… One. Two Three. Haley didn’t make it. That was Foyet’s final move, his greatest achievement. He died knowing that he had beat Aaron Hotchner. He died knowing that he took something that meant everything to Hotch. And that was a win for him. He didn’t have to kill Jack, he didn’t have to kill me, and he didn’t even have to kill Hotch. All Foyet needed to do was take out Haley and that was it.

Hotch’s hands curled into fists around the fabric of my sleeves. I knew that he was trying to stop. I knew that he didn’t want to keep crying. He had been brave all day. He had been so strong, despite everything. And now… Now… He just couldn’t hold it in anymore, and I couldn’t blame him. Haley was the first love of his life. They had been together since high school, and she gave him the greatest gift of their lives, which was Jack. They loved each other so much, even after the divorce, and even after meeting me. They had been through hell and back together, and he knew that he had to let her go when she had finally had enough, even though it was the hardest thing for him to have ever done. Hotch never stopped loving her, it just changed after their separation. He lost her and that was the breaking point.

Foyet had killed dozens of people over his lifetime, he had taunted us, he had stabbed Hotch, he had taken the ring that was supposed to be mine, he had stolen our family from us, and he had killed Sam. And yet… none of that broke Hotch until Haley. He could go through all of that without blinking an eye, and then there was Haley.

One. Two. Three.

Hotch leaned back and looked into my eyes. His nose was broken, his forehead, lips, and cheeks were all bleeding, and his tears were still streaming down his face; but he looked right at me and took my face in his bloody hands. “Are you alright?”

I shook my head. “Are you?”

He shook his head and screwed his eyes shut again. “She’s in the bedroom… On the floor… Her eyes are open… And she was staring at me…” I brushed some strands of his dark hair out of his face. “I’ve gotta close her eyes…” He let go of my face and slowly stood up.

“Aaron—” I tried to catch his sleeve before he could leave me, but he kept going.

I took a moment to just watch him through my fogged up eyes from where I was sitting on the floor. He stumbled around, catching himself on the walls, then pushed past Rossi, who was still standing there. As Hotch walked into the hallway, Rossi and I finally made eye contact. He nodded his head to the side, a gesture that I should go with Hotch because he shouldn’t be alone. I slowly stood and started peeling off my vest. Rossi took it from me as I passed him on my way into the hallway.

I felt my knees buckle slightly as I passed Jack’s room and saw Haley’s feet in our bedroom at the end of the hall. I could tell that was lying on the floor, just as Hotch warned me, yet I still wasn’t prepared for it. Only one shoe was still on her feet, the other one neglected on the side. Foyet had… He wasn’t known for messing with the bodies afterwards, but this was different. He wanted this to hurt as badly as it could. He took every precaution to ensure that he would win. Messing with Haley’s body after she was dead… That was just senseless and cruel. It didn’t bring him any direct pleasure. What did it for him was that it would hurt Hotch the most.

As I practically limped up to the bedroom, I saw that Hotch was already on the floor with Morgan, cradling Haley’s dead body in his arms and sobbing into her shoulder. Morgan had a hand on Hotch’s other shoulder to try and comfort him, but it wasn’t doing any good as Hotch continued to cry and cry. I had never seen him like that. I had never seen him so out of control, so broken. I had seen him cry before, of course, but this was different. This was watching his heart break over and over again as he realized that he wasn’t in a nightmare, that this was real life, that he had  _ really _ lost her, for good this time.

Morgan stood and met me in the doorway, “Y/N—”

He was trying to stop me from going in and seeing more, but I had to know. I had to see. I had to be with him. So I pushed by. Morgan let me pass, but I didn’t make it very far into the room.

One. Two. Three. They rang again as I saw all the blood.

One. Two. Three. I saw the bullet holes in her chest and neck.

One. Two. Three. I saw an engagement ring on her finger.

I turned to Morgan and covered my mouth to stop to myself from throwing up everywhere. He caught me and held me in his arms as I started sobbing again.

Foyet always liked to take something from his victims and put them on the next. It was his signature. When he hurt Morgan, he took his credentials, then left them on Hotch when he was stabbed and taken to the hospital. Hotch told me that Foyet had specifically gone looking for the engagement ring he was planning on giving me, and we all knew that it was going to be placed on his next victim— but I didn’t find any ring on Sam, considering Foyet had cut his fingers off. 

When I saw Haley, though, I suddenly knew why.

She wouldn’t have been wearing an engagement ring— she wouldn’t have even been wearing her old wedding ring. Foyet took the ring from Hotch because he knew he was going to kill Haley. He knew that he wanted this to be his grand finale, and he wanted to make sure it hurt like a bitch. He wanted to prove to Hotch that this was all somehow his own fault. If he didn’t divorce Haley, this wouldn’t have happened. If he didn’t turn down Foyet’s offer, this wouldn’t have happened. If he had been just a few minutes quicker getting to the house, this wouldn’t have happened. Hotch let Haley down and Foyet rubbed it in his face by not only taking Haley away from him, but the joy that came from buying that ring for me and the excitement of getting to propose to me one day with that very ring. Foyet knew that I wouldn’t want that ring anymore. He knew that Hotch wouldn’t want to even tear it off of Haley’s finger. He took Haley away, and he took away something that was important for us moving on.

He won in every way.

One. Two. Three.

* * *

Strauss stared at me silently. There were no words. There was nothing she could say to me that would matter, and she knew it. Even if she could give her condolences, I wouldn’t accept them from her. She didn’t care about me, or Hotch, or the team, or even Haley or Jack. Yet she still couldn’t even find the words to conclude our interview. All she could do was silently turn off the tape recorder between us and watch as I left the room.

As I stepped into the hallway, I let out the breath I had been holding in my chest for that entire interview. I put my hands on my knees and tried to focus on the marble floor in order to ground myself. Hotch approached me, his shoes sneaking into my field of view. I stood up straight and sighed.

“I never want to talk about it again. Ever,” I told him.

He nodded understandingly. The door opened again and Strauss told us that she was ready to speak with Hotch before the rest of the committee would show up to make the final decision about whether or not he would get to keep his job at the FBI. Hotch thanked her for letting him know and asked if we could have another moment alone. She smiled lightly and retreated back into the room.

We stared at each other again, just like we had before I went into the conference room to endure that Hell. Understandably, he was the nervous one now. He was probably going through the motions, too. He wanted me to go with him, he wanted me to hold him, he wanted me to be there as a constant reassurance that everything was going to be alright— that I was alright. He wanted to know that, no matter what, I wouldn’t leave him, that he hadn’t failed me, that I was safe and I was his. He lost one love, he couldn't afford to lose me, too.

“I love you,” I told him when we were alone again. “Whatever happens… I love you…”

Hotch cupped my cheek with one of his palms, and I pressed into his touch. “I love you, too.” He kissed my forehead, but when he pulled away, I leaned up to kiss his lips. We pressed into each other’s touch gently. I didn’t want to hurt him, and he didn’t want to hurt me, but we needed to feel the softness of each other’s lips, and we desperately needed the comfort of our kisses. “You’ll stay with Jack?” I nodded and felt tears welling up in my eyes again. “Don’t cry. Please,” he quietly begged.

“I’m trying,” I croaked. “I’m here. It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” He wiped away the tear on my cheek that managed to escape me. Before it could get worse, I turned away from Hotch’s touch and hid my face from him. “I’ll be with Jack when you’re done.”

Hotch stepped around me before he could break, too. I stood in the hallway as he entered the conference room, leaving me all alone. I let out an audible sob and started crying again. It was hard enough for me to go through that interview without shedding a tear… I couldn’t imagine the struggle Hotch was going to face over the next hour. And he was going to be all alone. All I could do was hear the way he cried that day replaying over and over again in my mind. I had never heard anyone sound that distraught in my life. It was probably even worse than hearing the gunshots. Whenever my ears weren’t ringing with the sound of Foyet’s weapon firing, it was echoing Hotch’s screams, and I could still feel it on my shoulder every time I thought about it.

“Hey, sunshine,” Morgan cooed from behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder.

I sucked in a shaky breath before wiping my eyes and turning around. When I saw him and the rest of the team standing there, Jack in JJ’s arms, I tried to act like I hadn’t just broken down by forcing a smile on my face so that Jack couldn’t worry about me.

“Hey, there, little man,” I said to Jack as JJ handed him over to me. He was getting so darn big; it was hard to hold him when I hardly had enough energy to stand up straight. Jack hid his face in the crook of my neck, just like he had when I pulled him out of the chest in our office. I felt the tears start to pour again, even though I was trying so hard to make it stop. “I love you…” I whispered to him, hardly making it to the end of what I really wanted to say. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too,” he whispered back, playing with my hair with his fingers as he said it.

I looked over at Emily and saw that she had finally broken. I held out the arm I could afford to let go of Jack with, offering the team the hug I desperately needed. Emily was the one who hugged me and Jack, Morgan hugging me and her, Garcia hugging him and Jack, and so on.

“I love you guys.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IM SORRY


	35. MOVING AND RETIREMENT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 5 Episode 10. A few days after part thirty-four.

Following that fateful afternoon, we spent every day in a nearby hotel. We knew that we couldn’t go back there after what happened. Hotch and I were hardly sleeping as it was, but being in that house would have just given us nightmares. There was no way in hell that we could continue to live there, even after they cleaned all of the blood out of the carpets and walls. Not to mention that it felt  _ wrong _ thinking about sleeping in the same room where Haley was found, and having Jack sleep in the same home where it happened… It wasn’t right.

Jack wasn’t sleeping, either. The first night, he managed to sleep in his own bed in the hotel room, but he started having nightmares after that, so Hotch and I let him sleep in our bed between us. It seemed to help all three of us calm down, but the only one who could achieve giving into exhaustion was Jack. I asked myself one night while watching him sleep if either me or Hotch would ever be able to sleep again or if I was doomed to always see Haley’s body whenever I closed my eyes. It must have been so much worse for Hotch. I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Finding Haley like that was probably the worst thing he had ever seen— even with the career that we had. We had seen and done so many horrible things, but nothing compared to finding the woman who brought Jack into this world, dead on our bedroom floor.

There wasn’t a moment during those following days that I let either Hotch or Jack out of my sight. If I weren’t holding them, I was at least close enough that I could grab them in an instant if I needed to. For instance, Jack liked the outdoor pool at the hotel, and he asked us on the second afternoon if we could go swimming. We hadn’t brought swimsuits with us, obviously, so Hotch tried to explain that we couldn’t; but I quickly insisted that I would ask Morgan to grab Jack’s Spiderman swimsuit for him from the house. Jack spent the next few days swimming in the pool while Hotch and I sat nearby, just holding hands and watching him. And while we sat there, I thought of every possible escape plan. I knew that Jack would be my first priority. I would’ve jumped right into the pool, grabbed him, and carried him in my arms as we ran.

But I also had to remember that we were safe now…

Hotch killed Foyet. There was no one out there now who wanted to harm us or kill us. There was no reason to hold onto Jack and Hotch every second of every day, and there was no reason to think up escape plans for if something bad were to happen. Nothing bad was ever going to happen again. Right? Even if it were a lie, I just needed to keep reminding myself and Hotch that we were going to be okay. I didn’t need to hold onto them, I didn’t need to think up escape plans, I didn’t need to worry to death.

But then I held Jack in my arms that night before Haley’s funeral. I held him as he sobbed, and Hotch and I quietly cried, trying not to make it worse for Jack. We were lying in bed, the three of us. It was late, and Jack managed to get a few minutes of sleep before waking up with a nightmare. He was screaming and holding his ears, and when I asked what was wrong, he told us that he could hear the gunshots. That was when Hotch and I moved closer towards each other so that we could both hold him and one another as tightly as possible. Jack just kept sobbing. No matter what we did or what we said, he couldn’t calm down. And I remembered why I needed to hold onto him. I remembered why I needed to think up those escape plans. My little man was practically torn from my arms a month and a half ago, and I promised myself that night before Haley’s funeral that I would never let go of him ever again. She was gone now, and I had to make sure that he would never get hurt like she did. I silently promised Haley that night that I would never let Jack get hurt. I would never let go of him. I owed her that. After everything she did for Hotch, Jack, and even me… I owed her that promise… It was a promise that I sadly couldn’t make to her face while she was still alive, but I still knew that she was out there somehow, and she knew.

When Jack finally fell back to sleep in my arms, and Hotch got up to wash his face clean in the bathroom, something tragic occurred to me. There were plenty of times when I thought about what it would’ve been like to lose Hotch—hell, there were times when I thought that I  _ did _ lose him, and each time it happened, it completely broke me. But I didn’t lose him. The truth of the matter was, he always came back to me. We couldn’t say the same for Haley. Working in the field we did, Hotch had probably imagined a thousand horrible ways that he could’ve lost his son and Haley, but neither of us expected this. How could we?

And then I thought about how he was disappearing during the afternoons. It first happened when he thought that I ended up falling asleep while Jack was showering after swimming, so he snuck out. But I wasn’t asleep. I couldn’t sleep. I was just facing away from him, laying down, silently crying into my pillow. When he left, I called Garcia, and I asked her to track Hotch’s phone. I knew I shouldn’t have spied like that… but I was so fucking worried. No one blamed me—especially Garcia, which was why she decided to help me. We found out that he was going to the storage unit he had out in Reston, which was only about twenty minutes away. Garcia checked out the client list of the local storage unit company where he was, only to find that Hotch had some kind of secret unit out there that I had no idea about. That was when I realized something heartbreaking. Hotch didn’t move on after him and Haley broke up—he  _ couldn’t _ . Even after she cheated on him, he couldn’t let go of all those years they spent together. She took most of her things with her, I was sure, but there were likely some things she neglected, so he had them stored away.

After we knew what was going on, I never stopped Hotch from leaving, or even said anything about it to him. I just stayed with Jack and I tried to help him understand what all was going on. Maybe I shouldn’t have rushed it, though. Maybe my errors were the reason he was sobbing in mine and Hotch’s arms that night before the funeral, screaming about how he could hear the gunshots.

In the morning, Hotch woke up Jack so that I could get ready on my own. I threw on the black dress that Emily pulled from my closet and brought over to the hotel yesterday, and that was it. I was done. I didn’t bother messing with my hair, though I probably should have, and I didn’t even try to clean up my face to hide my puffy eyes. All of that took too much energy—energy which I lacked. My time was better spent with Hotch, brushing his hair back with a comb and gelling it nicely with the mint scented one Morgan brought when he visited with Emily. While I was busy attending to Hotch’s hair, he was fixing Jack’s tie for him since he didn’t know how.

The room was silent. Eerily silent. It was possible that Jack was too scared to talk because he didn’t know what to say and he didn’t want to upset me and Hotch. All I knew for certain was that I couldn’t get a word out without feeling the urge to cry. I wasn’t sure how Hotch was going to make it through the funeral. I wasn’t sure  _ if _ he was going to make it through. Hopefully, having me and Jack there with him would help. All I could do was hope. I felt useless and helpless.

When we arrived at the cemetery, Roy, Jessica, and the team were already waiting for us. Jack ran to his grandpa and aunt, meanwhile I sought comfort in the arms of Emily Prentiss. She held me tight, refusing to let go. I was silently thankful for that. Morgan’s hand squeezed my shoulder suddenly to let me know that he was there, too. I left Emily’s arms, quickly falling into Morgan’s. As I looked over his shoulder, I saw Hotch shaking Rossi’s hand. Hotch didn’t like hugs. In fact, up until he met me, he didn’t even like smiling or showing emotion. He was going to do everything in his power to not break, to not show emotion like he always did. That was why he didn’t accept Rossi’s open arms. He knew that if he gave into something as simple as a hug from one of his closest friends, he’d fall apart in front of everyone before the funeral could begin.

By the time everyone else had arrived in time for the start of the funeral, Hotch, Jack, and I were standing directly in front of Haley’s coffin, protruding out of the grave that had been dug for her. JJ and Garcia handled setting up the funeral with Jessica since Hotch and I were really in no position to do so. They picked out a huge, expensive, mahogany coffin that had gold flowers molded onto the sides. It was ostentatious, I’d be the first to admit. It was probably a horrible thought to have, too… But I just couldn’t stop thinking about how in an hour or so, the coffin would be six feet under, and no one would ever see those gold roses again. So, why did it matter what it looked like? Why did it matter how expensive it was? And then I saw Jessica fall to her knees beside her sister’s coffin. She let out a heavy, dreadful sob. As her fingers ran over the gold flowers, she kept saying: “I’m so sorry, Haley…” That was when I realized that it mattered to Jessica. It mattered that the last memory she would have of her sister were of those golden flowers lining the bottom of her coffin. It mattered. It was incredibly important to Jessica, therefore I couldn’t argue or question it.

Jack tugged on the hem of my dress. When I looked down, he was holding his arms out in the air, his hands clasping and opening repeatedly in a way that said: “Pick me up, please.” I gave in. I leaned down and picked up Jack, resting him on my hips as he wrapped his little legs around my waist. He adjusted his grip on Red. We nearly left the hotel without it before he realized that he wanted to hold it throughout the funeral. So, I ran back into the room to grab it while Hotch started the car. But now that we were there, his cheek resting against my shoulder, the toy dinosaur squeezed into his hands, I almost regretted bringing it. Not because it was distracting or anything, but because it broke my heart into a million pieces. It was a huge, flashing red reminder that it could have been Jack’s funeral, too. It could have been him in that coffin. It could have been me, falling to my knees while sobbing, instead of Jessica. As horrible as it was to think, I was lucky. Hotch and I were lucky. He probably couldn’t see it because he was staring at his ex-wife’s coffin, but we got lucky, all things considered. We could have lost Jack, too, but we didn’t.

Hotch snuck his arm around my waist as the funeral began. I sighed quietly and rested my head on his shoulder, the same way Jack was resting against mine. The words of the priest standing at the head of Haley’s coffin went straight through one year and out the other. I couldn’t focus on anything other than the way we were all quietly crying. Roy, Jessica, Hotch, Jack, even me… We were all puddles of tears. Our quiet sobs and sniffles were all I could hear. It was all that was clear to me. Even when Garcia started crying, I could hear that… but I never once heard the priest until the dreaded part of the humeral came.

“We will now hear from Haley’s…” the priest struggled to find the right phrasing. “Haley’s husband, Aaron, has asked to speak.” He nodded in our direction, a signal that Hotch could start whenever he was ready.

Hotch looked at me as he dug out his speech from the inside pocket of his suit. “Don’t let go of me,” he pleaded to me quietly. I nodded and pressed into his side a little more. After opening up the page he wrote his speech on, he cleared his throat and began. “W.S. Gilbert wrote, quote, ‘It’s love that makes the world go ‘round.’ If that’s true, then the world spun a little faster with Haley in it.” His hand squeezed mine as he hesitated. I squeezed back. “I first met Haley in high school. I had spotted her when I was passing by the auditorium after school, and the drama club was holding a rehearsal for their spring show. I remember seeing her in the crowd of all the other students and telling myself that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I promised to make it my life’s mission to marry her right then and there.” He sniffled back a quiet sob. “I started my mission by joining the drama club so that I could get close enough to talk to her since we didn’t exactly run with the same crowds at the time. She was so kind to me… She offered to run lines with me, even though I was horrible at acting. She taught me how to sword fight for the show, even though _ she  _ was supposed to be the princess and  _ I _ was supposed to be the pirate.” There were a few light chuckles from the crowd. “It seemed like from the get-go, she recognized what my mission was, and she was doing everything in her power to ensure that I would succeed.” He flipped the page. “Haley and I certainly had our ups and downs. We disagreed on a lot, but if there’s one thing we agreed on wholeheartedly, it was our love and commitment to our son, Jack. Haley’s love for Jack was unconditional. She would have done anything for him… and she did. She isn’t here with us today because she did what her life’s mission was, and that was protecting Jack. It pains me to know that I can’t thank her today for bringing him into this world, for loving him, protecting him, being brave for him, and caring for him when I couldn’t.” My hand squeezed his again, just a reassurance that I needed. Hotch pulled me closer to him as he continued, “I made a promise to her that I will raise Jack knowing who his mother was, how we fell in love, and how much she loved him. If Haley were here today, I’m positive that she would look at all of us and tell us not to mourn her, and instead spend our time holding our family close—” he let go of my hand before winging his arm over my shoulders. “—and loving them unconditionally, because, in the end, they are all that matter.” I rested my head against his shoulder and hugged Jack closer to my body. “The other night, as I was looking through some of her old things, I found a copy of the play we were working on when we met. The Pirates of Penzance, it was called. As I was looking through it, reading all of the different notes she made on it to help improve my acting, I came across a passage that seems fitting for this moment. ‘Oh, dry the glistening tear that dews that martial cheek. Thy loving children hear, in them thy comfort seek. With sympathetic care, their arms around thee creep, for, oh, they can not bear to see their father weep.’” He folded the paper back up in his free hand and nodded back to the priest, a sign that he was done and couldn’t find the words to properly conclude.

The priest stepped forward and thanked Hotch for sharing that story of how he and Haley met. He said that Jack was lucky to have a father like Hotch, someone who loved him just as unconditionally as Haley loved him. Hotch kept his head bowed while trying to hide the tears that were sliding down his cheek. I brought my hand up to his face and wiped them away carefully with my thumb while thinking about how brave he was to speak and share like that. I wouldn’t have had the strength in a million years to do something like that.

As the funeral wrapped up, the family was asked to put roses on top of Haley’s coffin. Hotch took Jack from me, handing me Red so that he could give his son one of the white flowers. They lined up behind Jessica, waiting on her and Roy to set their roses down and say their goodbyes. When they moved out of the way, Hotch stepped forward. Jessica walked around the coffin and approached me carefully, trying to gauge if it was alright to hug me or not. I opened my arms for her, a silent signal that I would love nothing more than to hold her in my arms, to comfort her, to love her and thank her for everything she did for me on behalf of Jack and Haley. She crashed against my chest. Peeking over her shoulder, I watched as Jack and Hotch laid their roses down side by side. Then Hotch told Jack to blow his mom a kiss. I broke down, hiding my face in the crook of Jessica’s neck, crying just as hard as she was.

I didn’t lose a sister. Hopefully, I would never have to know the pain of losing my sister… But I understood Jessica’s pain. I understood that she was suffering and that none of the men in her life—Roy and Hotch—knew how to be open with her, knew how to hug her, knew how to cry with her. Losing Hotch, Jack, or Elle was my worst nightmare. I prayed that I wouldn’t have to be in Jessica’s shoes—ever. But what I did know was that my heart was broken. I was sad for Hotch, Jack, Jessica, and Roy. I was sad for Haley. It pained me to think that Jack wasn’t going to get to grow up with a mother now. It killed me to realize that Haley would never get to see her son grow up. His birthdays, his high school graduation, his college acceptance letters, his first partner, his first break up, his college graduation, his wedding—every single part of his future, Haley wasn’t going to be there to help him through all of it. The highs and lows of life that mothers were supposed to be there for were now going to be missing a special part. Jack was going to have a hole in his life.  _ That _ I understood.  _ That _ was what I cried for.

* * *

I bounced Jack slightly in my arms so that I could adjust my hold on him. He was asleep against my chest and shoulder, his arms wrapped around my neck, his face hiding against my collarbone. He had been crying when he came running over to me. We had only been at the wake for about thirty minutes when Rossi pulled Hotch outside to talk, and Jack had no one else to turn to but me. So, I picked him up into my arms and consoled him as he sobbed. The team, sitting at the table with me, silently watched. They were too scared to speak or move. None of us knew what to do now except to help Jack. But now that he was asleep, the team got back to talking quietly.

JJ had been crying the hardest. Since the beginning of the funeral, she had been nothing but a puddle of tears in Will’s arms, and since we sat down, she had been silently letting the tears fall while holding his hand. I think she looked at what happened to us and she thought about how she couldn’t bear to be in Hotch’s shoes. Losing Will or Henry was her worst nightmare. She only gave birth about three weeks ago, yet she was already back at work, putting herself on the line; but the question now, with Haley’s death being a result of Hotch’s job, was it all worth it? Was it fair for her to keep her job? Was it fair to put her family at risk like that? It seemed like as we all chatted through some small talk at the wake, she was silently considering everything.

Emily snapped me out of my trance with a direct question of, “When do you think you and Hotch are coming back to work?” She hadn’t asked to put pressure on us to come back soon, or because she was trying to tell us  _ not _ to go back yet, but because the team had run out of other topics. “Sorry,” she backpedaled when she realized she ruined my train of thought.

I shook my head. “It’s fine.” I shifted Jack in my arms again. Like I had said before, he was getting so big, it was hard to hold him in my arms for so long—but there was no way in hell I was letting him go. I was going to hold him, even if my arms broke. “I, um… I don’t know. There’s a lot we still have to figure out. We… I think we’re going to move… So…” Jack yawned against me, making me stop so as to not wake him up.

“Do you guys need help finding a place?” Morgan questioned, though it was more of an offer than anything else.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. A tear slid down my cheek. “I don’t know anything…”

They all stared at me. Everyone was at a loss for words. Their questions and topics had run out, and my ability to answer anything was limited. There was so much that Hotch and I needed to sort out. Like, where were we going to move? When could we get Jack into therapy? When were Hotch and I going to sleep? When were we going to head back to work? When was I going to call my parents back?

It was all a mess.

It was a mess, and we didn’t have a single answer to any of it. I wanted to find a way to put the pieces together, because I wanted to make things go back to normal, but I didn’t know how to do that when Hotch, Jack, and I were practically paralyzed. And then the worst thing imaginable happened. JJ’s phone started ringing. She sniffled and answered it before the ringtone could bother anyone any longer.

“Okay. We’ll be there as fast as possible,” she said into the phone after a minute of listening.

I shook my head insistently when the whole team looked at me. I wanted to tell them to stay, to not leave me and Hotch, to ignore the call of the psychopaths out there for just a little longer. But they had to go. They always had to go. Now I understood how Haley felt about Hotch leaving every time she needed him to stay.

“I’m so sorry,” JJ apologized quietly.

I realized that there was no way I could make them stay. I could make Morgan or Emily stay, if I really tried, but that wasn’t fair to any of them. So, I did the only thing I could. “Don’t worry about us,” I whispered. “We’ll be okay.”

“I’ll stay—” Morgan tried offering.

“No. Please. Go.”

“Sunshine—”

“We’ll see you when you get back.”

The team was silent as they all stared at me for a moment. When Jack started to stir awake, they all pushed their chairs back and stood. JJ kissed Will, Garcia kissed Kevin, and Morgan leaned over to kiss the top of my head. I forced a smile onto my face. I couldn’t give them a reason to stay; so, the stronger I looked, the easier it would be for them to leave. Emily went to tell Rossi that they were being called away after hugging my shoulder gently, making sure not to bother the half asleep Jack in my arms.

When they were gone, Hotch came back inside, taking the seat next to me, offering to take Jack until I silently refused because I didn’t want to wake him. Hotch sighed… but something was different about this one. It caught my attention almost immediately. The sigh wasn’t heavy and sad, like he was letting his emotion float off his chest, but it sounded like he was pissed about something. I didn’t understand what. Maybe it was the anger stage of grief finally hitting him like a train? Maybe something Rossi said outside upset him? Maybe the team leaving for another case got under his skin?

“What is it?” I finally asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he tried lying. I squinted at him. He sighed again, this time with the realization that I wasn’t going to let it go. “Sean didn’t come to the funeral. I thought he would come.”

My eyes pouted. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sick of making excuses for my brother, Y/N. I’m sick of sitting around, thinking that he’ll show up every time I need him to. I’m fucking sick and tired of looking after him—”

Jack yawned, making us both pause, thinking that he was waking up. When he nuzzled his face against my collarbone, we realized that he was still asleep.

“It’s over, Y/N. I’m done with Sean. I’m not dealing with his shit anymore. Once we get a new place and settle in, I’m going to call him and cut all ties. I swear to God, Y/N, I’m going to do it.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions quite yet, my love. Emotions are high right now, I understand, but he’s still your brother, and you still need each other—”

“And what about you and Elle, huh?”

I frowned at him. “Stop.”

He sucked in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Can we get out of here?”

“And do what?”

“Sleep.”

I considered if he really meant it. I wondered if all the crying and talking to people had finally managed to wear the two of us out. Maybe we would finally get to sleep for once since… Well, since our world fell apart. If Hotch was offering to finally try to sleep, I was going to take him up on the offer. I wanted to give him the chance to finally rest.

“Let’s go.”

I grabbed Hotch’s hand, making sure to hold onto Jack with my other arm. We stood together. Everyone’s attention was on us as we quietly made our way out of the wake, heading towards Jessica, who was waiting to say goodbye to us. Roy was standing behind her. Jessica leaned in and kissed Jack’s head before hugging me then Hotch, telling us to call her if we needed anything. Hotch tried to say goodbye to Roy, but he wouldn’t look at either of us. Him and Hotch never had a good relationship, but now that things had gone awry with his daughter’s life, he blamed Hotch wholeheartedly, and he wasn’t afraid to let his silent behavior tell us that.

Hotch’s breath shuddered as we stepped into the parking lot. Before he could fall off his feet, I hugged my free arm under his arms in order to hold him up. He finally let go. After holding everything back all day, he finally released every emotion building in his chest that he felt he had to hide from the world. I held onto him just as tightly as I was holding onto Jack. I was so surprised he hadn’t woken up yet. With Hotch sobbing against me, shaking as he did so, I was working overtime to hold them both up. I couldn’t let go. If I let go of Hotch, he was going to collapse onto the concrete. I  _ had _ to hold him. I had to do it forever or we’d both stop breathing.

And then I felt his fingers fist around the fabric of my sleeves. “I can’t do this…” he finally admitted.

“It’s okay, baby.”

“We have to get out of that house.”

“We will.” I kissed the top of his head. “We will.”

We stayed there for another few minutes before Jack lifted his head off my shoulder, turned his hands into fists, and rubbed his eyes to get rid of his sleep. Hotch turned away from us so that he could wipe away his tears. He didn’t want Jack to see him cry as hard as he was. It was okay to let his son know that crying was a good emotional response, but sobbing like that was entirely different.

With Jack awake now, we decided to make our way back to the hotel so that the three of us could finally sleep. We helped Jack change into his pajamas since he was only half awake. By the time he was ready for bed, he was practically asleep again. Hotch and I changed silently after tucking him in. Jack was hogging the right side of the bed, so Hotch and I cuddled close to each other on the left side, my back pressed tightly against his chest, his arms winged around me for warmth and comfort, our hands and fingers tangled together. Hotch kept kissing my neck and cheek every so often. And every time he did so, I felt my heart skip a beat. His love was the only thing giving me happiness through this whole ordeal. Being with him gave me a reason to keep pushing on.

“I love you,” he finally whispered into my ear before we both finally drifted asleep.

* * *

In the morning, I woke up only after Hotch and Jack had gotten up and ready for the day. I didn’t realize that at first, though, of course. When I opened my eyes, I found that the room was empty, giving me reason to immediately sit up and race around the room in search of clues of whether or not they were safe, or where they had gone. Nothing. So, I did the obvious thing by grabbing my phone and texting Hotch.

_ To Aaron Hotchner: _ Where are you?”

Nothing for ten minutes. I was biting my nails nervously while pacing around the room. I didn’t understand where they were, or why they left in the first place. Were they safe? Was something wrong with Jack? I didn’t understand what was happening.

_ To Aaron Hotchner: _ Baby, answer me.

Still nothing for another few minutes. Finally, when my paranoia got the best of me, I decided that I was going to call Garcia to have her track his phone again. Maybe I was being a little too overprotective. Maybe. But I wasn’t taking any chances when it came to my family. Yet, as I was about to contact Garcia, I heard the hotel door unlock. I stepped into the entryway just in time to see Hotch holding the door wide open so that Jack could run in with a box of doughnuts from Leonard’s. My breath sputtered as I released the urge to cry. Despite the fact that Hotch was balancing a cup holder with two coffees for us and a hot chocolate for Jack, I jumped into his arms, hiding my face in the crook of his neck.

“Woah,” he gasped, stumbling somewhat.

“You weren’t answering your phone…” I mumbled.

“I’m sorry, I had my hands full with the cups and holding Jack. I felt it buzzing, but I couldn’t get to it.”

“You weren’t answering your phone,” I repeated breathlessly, trying to find the relief of the situation and holding him in my arms again.

“I’m here. It’s okay.” He cooed he with a gentle shush for another moment before helping me off him so that he could kiss me. “I love you.”

“I love you,” I said before kissing him back.

“Gross,” Jack giggled from his bed further into the room.

Hotch and I let out gentle laughs. He closed the door behind him while I took the cup holder from him and carried it to the beds. Jack already had the box of dozen doughnuts open beside him, and his fingers were dancing over them as he debated which one he wanted. I stole the one I wanted before he could grab it. As he looked at me with his jaw agape, almost like he was offended that I chose before he did, I smiled and winked at him. He sighed and grabbed the chocolate glazed one in the corner.

“To what do I owe this surprise?” I asked Hotch.

“Well, I figured that today’s going to be busy, so it’s probably best if we have a good, sugary, and caffeinated breakfast to get us through it.”

“A busy day?”

He nodded. “We have to pack up the house.” He grabbed a maple bar.

I eyed him suspiciously. Was he sure about this? The funeral was only yesterday. Was he ready to pack up the house that he created with Haley? Was he ready to say goodbye to all of those memories? We hadn’t even put the house up for sale, yet, and we hadn’t gone house hunting yet. Where were we supposed to go? When he said he wanted to get out of that house, I thought he meant maybe in a week once emotions were a little more serene.

It seemed that it didn’t matter what I thought, though, because when we all finished our doughnuts and drinks, I got showered, changed into comfortable clothes, and then we drove to the house. Hotch told Jack and I to wait in the car for a bit. A few minutes later, he poked his head out the door and waved us in. When Jack and I walked up to the house, I held onto his hand as tightly as I could. There were already stacks and stacks of empty brown cardboard boxes and clear plastic storage boxes. That was probably another reason he had been going out to the storage unit over the past couple of days. He had been planning this. I supposed that I shouldn’t have been shocked.

Hotch gave one of the clear boxes to Jack. “Why don’t you start putting all of your toys from your toy room in here, bud.”

With a giddy skip, Jack took the box and ran down the hallway to head to his toy room… The stairs were there. The stairs that Hotch and Foyet tumbled down, leaving trails and pools of blood, Hotch’s head even leaving a dent in one of the walls. I turned to Hotch with the concern of Jack going over there on his own. Hotch calmed me down with the reassurance the crime scene cleaners had already gotten rid of all the blood, and Morgan patched up the wall for us. There was nothing to worry about.

“I even tied our bedroom shut to make sure that Jack can’t get in there,” he reassured me. So, that was why he asked us to wait in the car. He was baby proofing our house and making sure that there was no trace of what had happened for Jack to see. “Why don’t we start with the office?”

I grabbed Hotch’s hand. “I’ll do our room.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t want you to do that alone.”

“And I don’t want you to go in there at all.”

“Okay.” He brushed my hair out of my face with his free hand. “But, if it gets to be too much, tell me.”

“Deal.”

Hotch and I headed upstairs together with a few of the cardboard boxes. When we reached the top of the steps, we let go of each other, turning different directions to head to opposite sides of the house. Like Hotch said, our bedroom door was tied shut to make sure that Jack couldn’t get in, but it was easy enough to figure out the knot, then slide through. When I stepped inside, I took a moment to stare at the spot where we found Haley. The blood was gone. They did a really good job of getting it all out of the carpet, and even the comforter on the bed had been cleaned. There was no sign that anything horrible had happened there. Nothing but the flashes in my memory.

I gulped and set the boxes down. I started with our clothes in the closet. Everything from Hotch’s old college clothes that I stole from time to time, to my work clothes, to the black box and everything else stores away in the safe. Cleaning out the closet was the easy part. All I had to do was repeat the process of folding clothes over and over again until they were all stored away. Altogether, mine and Hotch’s clothes only took two boxes. I put the black box and all of our other safe stuff at the bottom of my box.

After the closet, I moved to the bathroom. I started with cleaning out the shower. Our shampoos, conditioners, soaps, shavers, everything else, they all made their way into another brown cardboard box. Then, I cleaned off the counter. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorants, the whole shebang. Collecting all of the bottles and containers in the bathroom was easy enough. It was just time consuming. But once it was all done, including the drawers and cupboards under the sink, all I had to do was put all of our towels on top for buffering and protection.

It was so weird that we could pack up our entire lives up so fast. It felt like only yesterday that Hotch and I were moving everything between my old apartment and the house. He was so excited to get me moved in. He wanted it to just be settled because he was afraid that the longer it took, the more time I had to reconsider and backpedal on my decision. He wanted me to live with him, and he wanted to make it happen as fast as possible. But now all of that hard work was being undone. Just as quickly as I had moved in, we were all being moved out.

A few hours passed, and I managed to practically finish packing up the entire bedroom. All that was left to do was have someone move the furniture out. Knowing Morgan, the second he heard that we were moving, he was going to offer to do it, and once he would offer, Emily, Rossi, Reid, and Garcia would all ask to help, too. They were going to turn it into a spectacle. I knew everything about them and their behaviors, which meant I knew exactly how they were going to behave during that hypothetical day of moving. Rossi and Morgan were going to do the heavy lifting, meanwhile Emily was going to insist that she could do it, too, but she would be too busy trying to hold Garcia back from going to the mall just to buy us all knew furniture. Reid would be in the corner, calculating all the ways to move the furniture out of the rooms and the house, and then he would already be planning the best way mathematically and scientifically to set up the furniture in the new house. The weird part about imagining all of that was that it brought a smile to my face. I liked thinking about how chaotic it would be, but how it would also be fun, and a great distraction from the shit in our lives.

When there was a knock at the door, I left the pile of boxes behind so that I could crack it open to investigate what was going on. Hotch was standing there, a smile on his face. “Lunch?”

“Let me guess, Jack asked if we could have mac and cheese.”

“What other option could there have possibly been?”

I laughed. “Touché.”

I stepped out of the room, making sure not to open the door wide enough for Hotch to get a good look inside. Like I said, I didn’t want him in there. I didn’t even want him  _ near  _ it. That wasn’t wrong of me. After seeing him fall to his knees and break down while holding Haley’s dead body on that carpet, I had every right to bar him from going in there. He didn’t need to relive that. Humans had a natural curiosity for the grotesque, and Hotch was no exception. He wanted a reminder of what happened, even if it wasn’t a conscious decision, which I was going to assume it wasn’t, considering what happened.

Because the dining room table had been destroyed during Hotch and Foyer’s fight throughout the house, we had to eat around the kitchen island. Hotch lifted Jack up and sat him on the marble. While I made the crappy mac and cheese for the three of us, Hotch turned on the radio on the windowsill, and turned it to our favorite channel. They weren’t playing Bohemian Rhapsody, which was somewhat of a let down, to be honest, but they were playing Blackbird by The Beatles, giving Hotch a reason to pause. He loved that song. He loved The Beatles, period, but Blackbird was one of his favorite lullaby songs. He would sing it in the shower sometimes when he thought I was asleep or elsewhere in the house. But in the context of the emotional week we had, it was a depressing song. So, I changed it before either of us could crack again. We found another channel that was playing a song Jack liked, so we settled on that, and I turned back to the stove.

When the food was ready, I dumped equal portions into three separate bowls, then handed them out. Hotch thanked me with a kiss against my temple. Jack, meanwhile, kicked his legs against the side of the kitchen island while he happily and quietly ate his lunch. The kitchen was silent. That was until I asked Jack if he finished packing up all of his toys. He set his empty bowl to the side and nodded.

“Do you want to start on your room now?” I asked, brushing his hair back out of his face. He nodded again. “Okay. Grab some boxes from the living room.”

“Do you need help getting them up there?” Hotch asked.

“No, I can do it,” Jack insisted while his dad helped him off the kitchen island and onto his feet.

“What do you say to Y/N for making lunch?”

“Thank you, Y/N.” He hugged my knees.

I kissed the top of his head. “You’re welcome, little man.” When we parted, Jack ran to go get boxes, then head upstairs. Once we knew he was gone, Hotch and I finished our last couple of bites of mac and cheese, then collected up all of the dishes and took them to the sink to be washed. “I finished the bedroom.”

“Closet and bathroom, too?” he inquired, surprised.

“Done.”

“The office is done, too.”

“We’ll just have to do the main level tomorrow.”

He nodded an agreement, then, for a bit, we were silent. Finally, he spoke up again. “So, I’ve been looking for a house—”

“In this neighborhood, right?”

Hotch cocked a brow at me. “What?”

“We need to stay close because we need Jessica’s help with Jack now that he’s going to be living with us permanently. And he needs to go to the same school so that he can keep his friends.”

“You’ve already thought about this, haven’t you?”

“I haven’t stopped thinking about it.”

Hotch handed me the dish to put in the dishwasher. “Well, that only eliminates one of the five houses I’ve been looking at.”

“It needs to have a backyard big enough for Jack to play soccer in.”

I didn’t want Jack going to the park anymore—at least not yet. Allowing him to go to the park would just make him an easy target. I wasn’t going to take that chance. That detail narrowed Hotch’s list down to three houses, since one of them was an apartment and the other had a backyard barely big enough for a dog to shit on.

I didn’t have any other specificities on my mind when it came to looking for a house. So, the next step was sitting down in the living room with Hotch, looking at the three houses that were now being considered, while discussing each of the pros and cons. One house was a block closer to Jessica, but two of the houses were closer to our work and Jack’s school. We decided that it was better to take the house closer to Jessica, since we were never sure when we would have to be called away for work. Trading up ten extra minutes to work and Jack’s school for convenience of having Jessica come over at a moment’s notice or dropping Jack off in the middle of the night, was well worth it.

Hotch showed me the details of the house we had narrowed our choices down to. It had three bedrooms— a master bedroom and home office for me and Hotch, and a bedroom for Jack. There were three bathrooms—two upstairs (one in the master bedroom and one between the other two rooms), one downstairs between the living room and the dining room. The best parts were the  _ huge _ backyard for Jack, and the garage big enough for both of our cars.

It was perfect. It was everything we wanted, everything we were hoping for, and the good news was that we could visit it soon, then, if we liked it, we could move in as fast as possible. I was glad. Rushing to buy a house wasn’t exactly ideal, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t sure that anyone could blame us.

“I’ll find a time when we can head over there to check it out,” Hotch offered.

I nodded. “Okay.” I kissed his cheek while combing his hair back a couple of times with my fingers. “I’m going to check on Jack’s progress with packing up his room.”

“Thank you, baby.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I pecked his lips with a gentle kiss before leaving to head upstairs. It was oddly quiet when I reached the top of the steps. I expected to hear Jack shuffling around his room, trying to organize everything away into boxes, just like he insisted he could do on his own. But there was nothing. The office just next to his room was already packed up into boxes and organized into the corner where Jack’s secret place was, but the lid was open, so I was sure that he wasn’t hiding in there. And Hotch and I had tied off the door to our bedroom to make sure he wouldn’t go in there… That meant he  _ had _ to be in his room. I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t hear him packing until I peeked into his rom to see him curled up on his bed. I furrowed my brows in confusion when I saw that his room looked untouched. He hadn’t packed a single thing yet.

“Jack?” I sat down on the edge of his bed. He hid his face in his pillows so that I couldn’t see him crying. My heart broke a little in my chest as I carefully reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come here,” I cooed, trying to make him look at me. He hesitated for a moment. “Please.” He finally gave in after letting out a quiet sob into his pillow. Jack sat up, and for the briefest of moments, I saw just how hard he had been trying to hold back his tears. “Come here, little man…” I held my arms open for him. Slowly, Jack moved so that he was sitting on my lap and hugging me. I wrapped my arms around him as tightly as I could. “Is it about your mom?” He nodded against my touch. I tried to ignore how his tears were already soaking my shirt.

“I miss her,” he cried.

“I know you do, little man.”

His hands turned into fists around the fabric of my shirt on my back. I recognized that he was trying to give me a Superman hug, but he didn’t have the strength for it. “I want her to come home…”

I bit back a sob as I felt the tears start to fall down my cheeks again. We had spent so long crying over the past few days, I thought that none of us had the energy to keep going. I didn’t even think there was enough in us to keep creating tears. Yet, somehow, while holding Jack in my arms as he sobbed and cried out for his mom, I felt the tears return.

One. Two. Three.

She had been on our floor. Dead. I could still hear her voice as she told Jack one last time how much she loved him. He had no idea what was about to happen. We had all heard the gunshots over the phone, but Jack had been in the house when it happened, and he probably had no idea where his mom and dad were. He had been hiding in his secret spot, probably scared to death. And he had been so brave for us. We thought that he just didn’t understand enough to know why his mom was gone, but since the funeral, I could tell that he knew. He knew that those three shots killed his mom, and he would have been next if it weren’t for his dad.

“Do you want to know something cool about your mom?” I asked him quietly. He nodded.

Throughout this whole ordeal, I couldn’t stop thinking about that one lie Elle told me when I was a kid in order to comfort me about death. She told me that we all turned into stars when we died. We would go up in the sky, and we’d become these bright bits of light that would protect our loved ones. It took me years to realize that she had lied about the stars the same way parents lie to their kids about Santa or the Tooth Fairy. It’s to protect them, but to also give them some kind of youthful hope. Whenever things like this happened and I would miss someone dearly, I’d try to trick myself into believing that they were a star now, watching and protecting us. When it came to Haley, I had been praying that was the truth because I just wanted Hotch and Jack to still have some part or some memory of her.

“So, when we said goodbye to her yesterday, something kind of cool happened.” I rocked him gently in my arms, taking in a deep breath to stop my crying. “When you put that flower down for her, she turned into a star, and she flew up to the sky. Do you know why?” He shook his head against my chest. “She did that so that she can watch over you and Dad all the time— not just at night. The stars are always there, even though you might not be able to see them… Just like your mom. Is that cool?”

He nodded through a heavy sniffle. “So, she’s watching us now?”

“Yeah.”

“She’ll always be there?”

“Always.”

He squeezed me harder. “And you’ll always be here?”

I hesitated for a moment. There was no guarantee that I would always be there for him, but I was going to try my fucking hardest to never leave him. I was going to do everything in my power to be there for him. “Always,” I repeated. “I’d never leave you or Dad. Ever.”

He parted from me slightly, giving me the opportunity to wipe his face clean with my palms, clearing away the tears that had been streaming down his face and soaking my shirt. I forced a smile onto my face. Being strong for him was hard, yet being able to fake it came effortlessly.

And then the doorbell rang. I sighed, looking to the doorway, debating if I should go answer it, or if Hotch would, or if I should go answer it  _ with  _ Hotch. I glanced back at Jack to see that he was already laying down again, his eyes closed. At least he wasn’t crying now. I decided that it was best if I just let him sleep, and I’d pack up his room later or tomorrow. So, until then, I quietly snuck out. I made sure to close his bedroom door behind me on my way out. When I started heading downstairs, I heard Hotch open the door and greet the one and only Erin Strauss. I paused. Please, of all people on planet Earth, why did it have to be her?

“Please, have a seat,” Hotch offered to her just as I was turning into the living room. He spotted me entering. “Hey. Is he okay?”

I took a moment to look between Hotch and Strauss, both of them staring at me with intrigue. Hotch wanted to know if his son was alright, meanwhile, Strauss wanted to know what the hell we were talking about. Well, my answer made things pretty plain, “He was crying, so we talked for a bit. He’s sleeping now.”

Hotch sighed and wiped his brows. “Okay. I’ll pack up his room later.”

“No. I’ve got it.”

He sent me a thankful smile.

“How are the two of you doing? That’s the real question,” Strauss said.

As I moved to sit down beside him, he turned his attention back to Strauss. He caught me and pulled me onto his lap before I could escape to take another seat in the room. It was odd to be so intimate in front of her. Considering that she tried to ruin both of our careers only a year ago, using our relationship as a reason to do so, I was shocked that Hotch would even touch me while in the same room as her. Granted, it was our home. She came to see  _ us _ while  _ we _ were mourning. Hotch needed to touch and hold me, and he probably needed to do it in front of Strauss to prove a point to himself and to her. We weren’t going anywhere. We weren’t a fling. We weren’t going to ignore our feelings because she didn’t like it.

I knew Hotch well enough to know that he was probably telling himself that if anyone could stick by his side during a time like this, then they were the one. I knew he was thinking it because I was considering the same thing. He hadn’t pushed me away yet. He could have closed himself off from me entirely, like he did after Foyet stabbed him, but he chose to pull me close and keep me there. He wasn’t going to ruin this. He wasn’t going to ruin  _ us _ when everything else in his life was falling apart. Because of that, he was going to hold me on his lap in front of our boss, regardless of what she thought about us.

“We’re… holding up…” Hotch answered reluctantly. “You said that there was something to discuss with me?”

Strauss nodded. “Ah. Yes.” She reached into her briefcase that was resting against her ankles, and she passed a piece of paper to Hotch. He only let go of me with one hand to take it.

I paused when I saw what it was.

“This is retirement,” Hotch said with a mixture of shock and confusion.

“I’ve talked with the Director,” she explained, “and we agree that there’s no reason that you should have to return to the Bureau. We can offer you full pension and benefits. It’s a good offer for you and your family.”

“Are you saying that you want us to leave the BAU?” I questioned. Were we really doing this all over again? I was so confused. Did she not learn her lesson last time? She couldn’t get rid of us, no matter how hard she tried—

“Not you, Agent Greenaway. This is only for him. And, I’m obviously not going to make the choice for you,  _ Agent Hotchner _ , but… I’m offering you a way out.”

“Who would run the BAU?”

“Agent Morgan’s temporary promotion has actually exceeded our expectations,” she replied. “The BAU would be well cared for, if you decide to step down, Aaron. The team would be together, just like you always wanted; and you could be with your son. I think that it’s a win-win.”

“But, what about—”

“When would you like my decision by?” Hotch asked patiently.

Strauss stared at him blankly. “I thought I would be leaving with one.”

Leaving with an answer? She just dropped the retirement bomb on us while we were still grieving the death of Haley. It seemed pretty fucked up, not going to lie. The least she could have done was given Hotch the opportunity to think about it. This was a lot to consider. Hotch and I loved our jobs, I used to think that there was never a chance in a million years that either of us would leave the BAU unless we were dead or too old to walk. But Strauss was right, considering the circumstances, maybe it was time for Hotch to focus on Jack instead of the job. I understood  _ why _ she was doing this, I didn’t appreciate the  _ how _ she was going about it, however.

“I would just like to weigh all of my options for a bit,” he responded.

“Whatever you need.”

Strauss stood to take her leave before she could become any more of an inconvenience than she already was. Hotch patted my hip, a silent signal for me to stand, so I did. We led Strauss to the door, saying our goodbyes, being polite because we really didn’t have the time or energy to do anything else. We were tired. Not  _ tired _ , in the sense that we didn’t get enough sleep—though that was still true—but we were tired, in the sense that we were weak mentally and physically. Our emotions had run out, and our mental tolls had been spent. Erin Strauss wasn’t worth the stress. The sooner she was gone, the sooner we could move on with the grieving process and helping Jack.

Hotch closed the door once she was gone, and the alarmed beeped as it was set. We took a second to stand in the doorway in silence, reflecting on what had happened, and what decision Hotch was possibly going to make. It wouldn’t come lightly. He needed to turn it over in his head for a few days at least before deciding. Either way, he would tell me his decision before going to Strauss and the Director.

“So… what do you think?” he finally asked.

I shook my head, turning away from him so that I could make my way into the kitchen. “It’s your decision, Aaron.”

“But I want to know what you think.”

He followed me around as I responded, “I think that you love your job as much as you love me and Jack. I think that you hated it the last time we didn’t have our jobs at the BAU.” I folded up a towel lying around on the kitchen island. “But I also think that you keep getting hurt.” He took the towel from me, then hung it on the rack on the cabinet under the sink. “Our family keeps getting hurt, but now we have Jack to look after all on our own, and we can’t afford to keep putting him through all of this.” I sighed and looked at him. “Maybe it  _ is _ time to take a step back, Aaron. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for you to be out in the field anymore.” I braced my hands on his shoulders, squeezing gently to let him know that I was there for him, no matter what. “That’s what I think.” I caressed his cheek with my thumb. “What about you? What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Genuinely. It’s all so…”

“Sudden?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m going to have to think about it.”

“Take your time. No one will rush you into making the decision. I promise.”

Hotch turned away from me, slipping out of my light touches so that he could grab his phone and call Jessica. He had apparently scheduled a time to see the house tomorrow, but we didn’t want Jack to go with us, so we were asking that Jessica could look after him a bit while we were gone. As usual, she didn’t care. It seemed she was actually excited to be looking after Jack again. Since Hotch and I had been taking time off from work, there really was no reason for Jessica to babysit, but that didn’t mean that we weren’t allowing her to see him. It was just that things were so chaotic, it never came up. But now, the perfect opportunity had arisen.

* * *

The next morning, we headed back to the house so that we could start packing up Jack’s room before we had to leave to see the new house we were eyeing. Around eleven, Jessica showed up, ringing the front door. I was busy wrangling Jack since he just had another leftover doughnut from the day prior, so Hotch went to greet Jessica while still laughing at my struggle. I rolled my eyes at him.

“I’m… gonna…  _ getcha _ !” I leapt around the corner of the couch, catching Jack trying to hide under the cushions, as if it weren’t obvious. Jack laughed and kicked at me as I tickled him. “Gotcha!”

“Stop!” he pleaded playfully through a laugh.

“Never!” I lifted him up and swung him through the air. He kept giggling and kicking at me, but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to relent on my attack. This was the first time I had heard him laugh in forever. I loved my little man’s laugh. There was no way I was going to give up on making him laugh now. “Give me a kiss and I’ll stop.” Jack grabbed my shoulders to hold himself steady, then leaned in to kiss my cheek quickly. I smiled and stopped tickling him. That was when I saw Hotch and Jessica watching us. “Go say hi to Aunt Jessica,” I whispered to him, setting him down on his feet.

“Hi, buddy!” Jessica cheered. She knelt down just in time to catch Jack in her arms. “The grownups have to talk for a second, but I hear that you still have to pack up some stuff. Why don’t you head upstairs and I’ll join you in a bit?”

“Okay,” Jack agreed, wiggling out of her arms.

We all watched for a moment as he ran off, his light up sneakers clomping down the hallway, then up the steps on the opposite side of the house.

“Alright, you two, fess up. What’s wrong? Something’s clearly off.”

Hotch and I turned to Jessica with wide, confused eyes. How the hell did she know that something was wrong, beyond the fact that we were still upset and stressed about everything going on. We weren’t even being  _ off _ . Were we? I thought we were behaving adequately, given the circumstances. But How decided to give into Jessica’s prying. She was a lot like Haley in the sense that neither of them stopped prying into something once they were made aware of it, It seemed it ran in the family.

“The Bureau has offered me retirement,” Hotch answered.

“What did you say?”

“I haven’t given them an answer yet. Between Jack, the move, the team, even Y/N,” he looked over at me, “there’s just a lot to consider.” He turned back to Jessica. “You know, Jack needs me more now more than ever. That means being here full time, because I would never in a million years dream of asking Y/N to leave the FBI, too.  _ I _ would have to put all my time and energy into being a dad—and I don’t mind that… I just… After Haley and I broke up, I didn’t get to see him very often, and that was hard, but I knew that at least he had his mom. But now he doesn’t… And right now, he really needs his dad. Which leaves me in a tough spot, because I don’t know how to leave the job I love in order to just sit around all day, every day. Even if it is for Jack.”

“Listen, Aaron,” Jessica began. “We both know that you and Haley split up for a multitude of reasons, but we also know that not a single one of those reasons is because you two stopped loving each other. Your job just got in the way. Now, you’ve found someone who is in the same boat as you, so your relationship with them is never at stake. But I understand that you feel like your relationship with your son is at stake now, the same way it was with Haley. You won’t lose him for choosing your job, Aaron. You won’t lose him because you  _ have _ to chase the bad guys. You’ll lose him if you stop living your life because you stopped doing what you love. If you’re worried about someone looking after Jack, don’t be. I’m willing to look after him every time you guys need to go off to work. I mean it. My job’s flexible. My in-person hours are limited, and I can come and go as I please. It’s easier for me to be here on a whim than anyone else. Jack’s my nephew, and the two of you are my family… I want to do this for you guys and Haley.” She looked over at me. “I appreciate that you’ve been good to Jack, and you always treated Haley fairly and with respect. Not many people in your position are mature enough to do so. For that, I have no reason to tell you guys that I wouldn’t look after Jack. I love him, and I can afford to give up my TV dinners and wine to look after him. The two of you can’t give up your jobs ever, and I understand that.”

“Jessica, we appreciate that, but we can’t ask—”

“You can. And you should.” She reached out to hold his hands. “For Haley.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“We should get going,” he said more to me than her. Their hands parted, so that he could hold mine. “We’ll be home in about an hour.”

“No worries. Take all the time you need.”

I let Hotch pull me along through the house. I threw a smile in Jessica’s direction, silently thanking her for watching Jack, talking to Hotch, and offering to help us out. She was an angel. She didn’t have to do any of this for us, but she wanted to, and I knew that we were both grateful for that, though Hotch clearly wasn’t sure how to respond. He didn’t take offers like Jessica’s well normally. He didn’t know how to accept people’s help or love, and sometimes that was okay, but, recently, we needed all the love and help we could get. Sooner or later, Aaron Hotchner was going to have to learn that there were people in his life that weren’t going to disappear. There were people who loved him unconditionally. There were people willing to climb mountains for him. And at the front of each of those lines would be me, waiting for whatever he needed.

* * *

The house was perfect, just like we had anticipated that it would be. It fit all of our needs, and it was a great place for us to raise Jack together. I could see us being happy there. Truly. In the other house, it always felt like I was living someone else’s life—like I was living  _ Haley _ ’s life. I had moved into her home that she chose and decorated herself. There were things that Hotch had changed over time in order to make it more his home than theirs, but it just never felt like us. Now that Haley was gone, as depressing as it was, we could make this ours.

Sometimes it felt wrong to be moving so fast. Really. I’d take a step back from the moment, and I’d be reminded that she had only just died a few days ago, and that maybe it was wrong to already be asking the questions of: How were we going to move on? How were Hotch and I going to raise Jack? Where were we going to move? How could we turn the life that used to be hers into the life that was now supposed to be mine? But then I was reminded that we couldn’t stay in a hotel forever. At some point or another, we were really going to have to ask ourselves those questions anyhow. With how desperate Hotch was to get out of that house, it made sense that we were already asking all of the important questions. We had moped around for long enough. It wasn’t time to move on, but it was time to escape the horrors of what happened.

The only downside to the perfect house of our dreams was the price that came with it. The mortgage was ridiculous. If Hotch retired from the FBI, our income would decrease by  _ a lot _ , even with the offer Strauss gave us that included pension. I wouldn’t be able to afford that house on my own. The only reason Hotch had the other house in the first place was because him and Haley bought it back when he was still a prosecutor, making nearly double what we made at the FBI. He had that money saved up, and it helped him pay the mortgage. This new house, though… We couldn’t afford it if he gave into Strauss’s offer. That was the sad truth.

It was disappointing because we really loved it, and we thought that it was possible to start our new lives there together; but it obviously made the choice for him. If we bought the house, he had to stay with the BAU. If he left the BAU, we probably had to buy that apartment. Neither of us wanted that apartment. That option only crossed Hotch’s mind originally because he was grasping at straws for places that made sense for us. Realistically, if we didn’t want—or, technically,  _ need _ —a backyard for Jack, an apartment would have worked because it was safer than a house. Someone like Foyet wouldn’t be able to find us in a sea of other apartments. Even if someone did find an apartment we could potentially move into, the place had security in the lobby, security cameras in the elevator and every hallway, and there were neighbors who could come to our aid in case of emergency. For that reason, apartments were nice. But it wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted that house.

“I need a bit to think about it,” was all Hotch said to me as we pulled up to our house again. He dropped me off so that he could “think about it” alone. As much as it pained me, I didn’t protest. He needed to be alone for a bit. I didn’t blame him for needing some time to take to himself, to ponder all of the choices he had to make, and everything he felt he needed to do for me and Jack. It was a lot. It was more than he deserved. Though he knew that I would always be there for him and support his decisions, sometimes it was better to do it on his own then come to me about it afterwards. I needed that same space after our huge fight after Foyet stabbed him. Since he was so understanding with me during that time, I could be understanding with him during this tough time.

When I walked inside the house, I found Jessica and Jack watching TV together on the sofa. I paused when I saw what they were watching. Home videos of Haley and Hotch’s wedding. I saw her face, and I immediately felt the tears return. I was so fucking sick of crying at every mention of her name, but seeing her face again was ten times worse than hearing her in reference, and I couldn’t believe how painful it was. Hotch looked so happy back then. Haley used to tell me that Hotch never smiled around her the way he smiled around me, but that video Jack and Jessica were watching proved her wrong. The smile plastered to his face in that montage was the same smile he wore after I told him I loved him for the first time.

“I didn’t realize that you guys were back already,” Jessica said to me after quickly turning the TV off. I stared at the blank screen. “Sorry. Jack found the VHS tapes in the desk over there,” she pointed to the far left wall, “and he asked if I knew how to play them.” Jack came running up to me, crashing against my legs, hugging my knees because I hadn’t offered to pick him up. Jessica pried him off of me. “Why don’t you go pack up all of your toys in your room, Jack.” He ran off after letting out a mild protest that neither Jessica not I responded to. “Where’s Aaron?” she inquired once Jack was gone.

“He left to take some time to himself,” I croaked, snapping myself out of my trance

“He just needs some more time to mourn,” she reasoned.

“I know.”

“He’ll be himself again, eventually.”

“I know.”

She hesitated for a moment. “Do you want to talk?”

I looked at her. “How are you functioning right now? How are you  _ breathing _ ? Walking, talking, smiling, living, keeping up with Jack? How are you doing it?”

“I’m not. I’m just really good at pretending.”

“I didn’t even know her all that well, and I can’t even  _ pretend _ . I try to smile, and I find myself just falling apart again.”

Jessica sighed quietly. “I know that I have to for that little boy upstairs. I know that I just have to wipe away my tears, hide my aching heart, and throw a smile onto my face because if I don’t, I’ll just break… And if I break… I’m not sure if I’ll ever stop crying. So, I bottle it up. I hold it all back until I can get home, lay down, stare at my ceiling, and then think of the good times until I can fall asleep.” She scratched her hair. “There’s this short second every morning when I wake up when I forget what happened. I don’t remember that I lost my sister. I don’t remember that I’m going to be an only child for the rest of my life. And I’m happy. I can find the strength to genuinely smile for the shortest moment… And then I remember. It all comes flooding back, and it overwhelms me. I stare at my ceiling again, and I think to myself that I don’t want to live in a world where I don’t have my sister anymore. But when I look at the picture of Jack on my bedside table, I’m reminded of why I’m still here. I tell myself that Haley wouldn’t want me to give up. She would want to know that her son will at least get to grow up with a loving father and aunt—and you, someone who loves him just as vividly as Hotch and I do. I’m here because Jack needs me to be, and because Haley would want me to be.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “We’re not alone in this, Y/N. Jack has us. I have you, Hotch, and my father. You and Hotch have all of us. No one is alone. If you feel like you need to fall apart in order to get through this, then fall apart, because I will be there to help you and Hotch pick up the pieces. Because that’s what family’s for.”

I sniffled and hugged her tightly. “Thank you.” That was all I could muster the strength to say. She had just poured her heart out to me, giving me a whole speech about coping, depression, love, and how I was her  _ family _ , and all I could fucking say was “thank you.” I was so pathetic…

Jessica nodded against my shoulder. “I want you to know something,” she said while parting from our embrace. “If Hotch didn’t have you, I don’t think he would even be up on his feet right now. I don’t think Jack would have any hope that things will get better, if it weren’t for you. I should be the one thanking you.”

“I—”

“Jack told me what you said about Haley turning into a star. I think it’s a lovely story.”

“My sister told me that story when I was younger.”

“She sounds like a great person.”

“She is.”

“Don’t take her for granted, Y/N. Take it from me.”

I paused. I didn’t even get the chance to take Elle’s love for granted anymore. One day, she just up and left without a word, leaving me behind to ask myself what the hell happened. Missing her hurt like a bitch. There were times when I thought I would never get over how much it hurt to not have Elle around. But I at least had the luck of knowing that she was still out there, alive, and doing something she loved with her life—whatever that was. Haley was gone, and Jessica never got to say goodbye. Only, with Haley, Jessica knew that she would never get a random chance later on in life to say goodbye to her sister one last time.

“I should go,” she said quietly. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

I watched as she grabbed her purse and coat from the hangers next to the front door. “Thank you for watching Jack while we were gone. I know Hotch appreciates it, too.”

Jessica smiled at me, one hand on the door, her other hand holding her things. “He loves you a lot, Y/N. He loved Haley, too, but not like this. They tried. Don’t get me wrong, they  _ really _ tried; but I’ve never seen him like this before. He loves you. Don’t take that for granted, either.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

She smiled at me again before leaving.

I was never going to take Aaron Hotchner or his love for granted. Ever. Especially after what happened, I knew that there would never be another day in our lives where I wouldn’t tell him: “I love you, I love, I love you…” as many times as I could.


	36. SWINGERS CLUB

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 6. Episode 04. Six months after part thirty-five.

Hotch turned down Strauss’s offer. Because Jessica was so willing and adamant about helping us out with Jessica, the reasons for Hotch to retire were dwindling. The only other reason he would have considered it was if he could guarantee that retiring meant that nothing bad ever happened to our family again. But what were the chances of that, realistically. I wasn’t going to quit, so there was always a chance that I could get hurt in the field. And Hotch had been in the business of putting bad guys away for a very long time, even way before joining the BAU. When he was a prosecutor, he made sure the worst of the worst went away for as long as possible. At the FBI, he caught the bad guys and sent them to be judged by the same courts he once worked for. Who was to say that any one of the thousands of people he put away wouldn’t hunt him down and try to do what Foyet did, too? At least being in the field gave him a chance to stop them before it was too late.

About three months after Haley’s death, I returned to work. Morgan was still leading the team, which was… still interesting. I just wanted Hotch back. I knew that he needed more time, so I wasn’t going to force his hand on any of this, but being at work without him felt plain wrong. I spent about two months in the field on my own with the team. When we came back from a case in Oregon, I walked into the bullpen to find that Hotch was up in his office, talking to Strauss. A sigh of relief immediately left me. I dropped my things by my desk, ran up the ramp, then stormed into Hotch office, interrupting his meeting with Strauss. He caught me in his arms. We saw each other every time I wasn’t on a case, obviously… But seeing him in his suit again, sitting at his desk, looking all professional… I was ecstatic.

He had only been back at work for a month, but during that time, the entire team worked together to help Hotch ease back into it. Morgan was the unit chief, and Rossi was always the lead profiler, but since returning, I had stepped up a bit. It happened naturally. One day, Morgan asked if I could lead the case discussion on the jet, then on another case, he asked if I could lead the profile, and then it just continued from there. By the time Hotch was integrating himself back into the team, he was shocked to see how things had changed. People looked to me. There was an unspoken amount of authority the team entrusted me with, but it was still there, and I still utilized it, as skeezy as it could have been.

It was six months in total since Haley’s death. A lot had happened since then, keeping us all busy, but we never forgot. Even when we moved houses, put Jack into therapy, and went back to work, Haley was always on our minds. I still couldn’t get the image of her body out of my head. Every time we started a new case, like the one in Akron, Ohio we were headed to, I would see Haley instead of the victims. I didn’t understand how Hotch could do it. How could he come back to work, look at these bodies, at all of the blood, and face psychopaths just as bad as Foyet, and never blink an eye. He had changed so much. Hotch didn’t show emotion in the field, that wasn’t new, but there was a new kind of distance he was putting between himself and the rest of the team. Not me, though. He promised he wouldn’t push me away this time, and I wasn’t going to let him.

“Y/N,” Morgan snapped his fingers in my face. I shook off my train of thought. “You alright?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because we landed five minutes ago, and the team’s been waiting for you outside for three of those minutes.”

I sat up, looking around frantically to see if it were true. The jet was empty. I scrambled to my feet. “Sorry.” I grabbed my go-bag from one of the overhead bins, then pushed past Morgan to get to the exit of the plane. When I reached the steps, I saw the team waiting at the black SUVs for me. “Sorry, guys.”

I hurried to the car that Emily was standing in front of, since Hotch had ordered that I would go with her and Morgan to see the recent crime scene. JJ and Hotch were going to start building the case and profile at the precinct, and Reid and Rossi were going to talk with the families there, too. But they waited for me. They were standing around, keenly aware that something was wrong with me. I wouldn’t have spent three extra minutes on the jet with no one around.

We had reviewed the case during the flight, not in the roundtable room or otherwise. It was straight to the jet, where Morgan and Hotch led the discussion, which I seemed to remember but never participated in. Our Unsub was forcing his victims—which happened to be couples—to have sex before killing them while they were still… _connected_. We were only made aware of the case when two couples had been killed in their cars, and one couple had been killed in their home. I think that was what made me disassociate. That little detail. A couple killed in their home… I couldn’t do anything but stare out the window of the car as I thought about it.

The M.O. at all three scenes were the same. Since the killings in the house were the first, they were the messiest and out of ritual, but he had learned from his experiences, and honed in on what he desired during his crimes. Comparing the two crime scenes in cars was our best way of understanding this Unsub. He started by getting into the car somehow, then forcing the couples into the back seat, had them tied up somehow, then had them fuck in front of him. When they climaxed, he shot the husband, then stabbed the wife repeatedly. Overkill. Victimology didn’t matter in this case because it was clearly all about the sex. He crossed racial lines, socioeconomic lines, clearly gender lines, and so on. There was no connection between the three couples except the sex.

Our job at the most recent crime scene was to figure out how he got into the car, how he subdued two victims, had them undress, tied them up, watched them have sex, then killed them without anyone every noticing or anything going wrong. I mean, controlling the victims with a gun was the most obvious answer, but still… Two versus one? Wouldn’t they have put up a fight before he tied them? Did they know him? Were they expecting things to go entirely different? The answers could only be found at the crime scene.

When we arrived, Morgan talked to the lead detective to ensure that we could have some time to look at the crime scene privately, but he also wanted to make sure that everything was clear for us to fiddle with. If there was any bit of evidence that hadn’t already been documented and taken into the lab, if possible, then we needed to wait. Since all of our questions could only be answered inside the car, we would possibly have to disrupt a few things here and there.

The scene was clear, though, so Morgan, Emily, and I approached the car with blue rubber gloves on. I made my way to the passenger’s side of the car. The Unsub had been sitting in the driver’s side, according to the crime scene unit. The victims were in the back, the woman on top of the man. Morgan was holding a stack of crime scene photos that the lead detective handed him, but I was waiting to see them until I had looked at everything as it was myself. Working backwards proved to work sometimes.

Morgan sat down in the driver’s seat to imitate the Unsub’s behavior. “I don’t understand how he got here, though.” He turned to face the bloody backseat. “If he was lying in wait back here, and the couple was waiting up front, then he made them drive to this secondary location, how did he convince them to move to the backseat? Yeah, okay, he has his gun trained on the wife in order to make the husband cooperate, but who’s to say that the husband wouldn’t try to fight back during the mini game of musical chairs?”

“There was no sign of forced entry into the car,” I said. “It’s possible he was waiting for them outside of the car, then made them get into the backseat, tied them up, then drove to this secondary location for privacy.”

“It’s possible. But making them undress and taking the time to tie them up at the original location is dangerous. He would have done that out here.”

“Not necessarily. If they were originally into it—”

“You mean, they consented to the idea of bondage in the car?” Emily inquired.

I nodded. “Yeah. If they thought they were just going to have a good time, they would have willingly gotten undressed, the man would have gotten worked up, and they would have tied each other up. It plays to the Unsub’s potential fantasy.”

“But the male vic’s tox screen shows that he had Viagra in his system, even though it wasn’t prescribed to him,” Morgan said.

“Well, you definitely don’t give Viagra to a man who’s already into it…”

“Exactly.”

“Let’s try out Y/N’s theory real quick,” Emily said.

Morgan smirked. “Finally. Which one of you wants to jump in back with me?”

Emily and I chuckled simultaneously at how quickly he was trying to scramble into the backseat. After a second of watching him struggled, I pushed him out of the way, and Emily and I settled in the backseat. She took the left side, and I took the right side. We were sitting up straight, facing the front windshield, Emily staring straight at the back of Morgan’s head.

“This is too messy, if it’s Morgan’s way,” Emily began. “I could easily have taken off my belt to strangle the Unsub, or even reached forward to take his gun while he was driving. So, they were _definitely_ already tied by the time they got here.”

“Wait—” Morgan said, a lightbulb dinging in his mind. “Viagra takes at least thirty minutes to work properly—”

“How do you know?” I teased.

He glared at me through the rearview mirror. “We go by Y/N’s theory, right? They get into the car, they’re into it, having a good time; and the Unsub’s sitting up front so that he can watch their fantasy play out. When the wife ties the husband to the car, that’s when the Unsub pulls the gun. He ties up the wife next. Since the anxiety of the situation has turned the husband off, the Unsub gives him Viagra so that by the time they would get here, he’d be ready.”

“So, we just got in the car…” Emily muttered, closing her door. I followed suit. “I know that I have to lay down…” She moved to bring her feet up onto the seat, but I was in the way. “And my wife has to straddle me, in order to make room for _it_.” Emily grabbed my hand and pulled me onto her thighs. She was leaning her back against the left car door, her feet tapping against the right car door. I moved so that I was more comfortable on top of her. “My wife ties me like this,” she said while holding her wrists behind her, like she was restrained against the doorhandle.

“Then I pull the gun,” Morgan said, turning around in his seat to face us, his hands held up with a finger gun. “I tell you both that if you try anything, I’ll kill you both.”

“Since I don’t want myself or my husband to die, I comply,” I said, holding my hands together behind me to imitate how the wife was tied.

“I turn on the car at that point…” Morgan put the keys in the ignition. Suddenly, the car heated up like a fucking sauna, and the music was blaring in our ears. Morgan turned it down quickly. “Woah.”

“He turned up the heat and the romantic music all the way in order to make them comfortable,” Emily realized.

“That was how they were _both_ still able to climax,” I noted.

“This isn’t sadistic. It’s romantic.”

“He didn’t participate, he gave the men Viagra, and then he used a knife—which usually indicates impotency. He can’t get it up anymore. He can’t find release, so he humiliates the husband with the drug, then uses the knife to mimic the bodily penetration he wants to have with these women, but can’t. That’s sadistic, Em.”

“Yeah, but why set the scene, then?”

I hesitated. “He lost someone—probably because of his impotency—but it was someone he truly loved. That’s why he chooses married couples and wants it to be somewhat romantic. They’re surrogates for the life he doesn’t have anymore.” I rolled off Emily and hurried out of the car.

I started churning all of this over in my head. So, we had an idea of _how_ he was doing it, and there were some hypotheses of _why_ being tossed around, but nothing was set in stone. Some things made sense; others made little to know sense. My theory about it being consensual, for instance, made sense, but there were a few details here and there that didn’t add up. Like, why didn’t the woman pull herself off afterwards? Why would the victims not think something was off about the Unsub not participating? And then it hit me. If someone were to come up to me and Hotch and say: “Hey, want to have a threesome?” I was pretty sure both of us would decline and get as far from that situation as possible. But if we knew the person asking… maybe, just maybe… But how would three different couples be into the idea of a threesome with one person? What were the odds of that?

There were a handful of places that couples could meet someone like our Unsub. A bar, online, a BDSM party, a swinger’s club. Wait— He was likely married. The bondage made sense for a BDSM party, sure, but it didn’t seem like he was actually a Dominant, like Hotch. These murders were trying to _prove_ that he was a Dominant. So, if he went to a BDSM party with his wife, there was no way in hell any couple saw that he could participate as a Dominant in whatever fantasy they had. So, they must have met online or at a swinger’s club. But if they met online, it was unlikely that the victims would have been so willing to get into a car with him. That left a swinger’s club.

It was just a theory, though—and it was farfetched. I couldn’t go to the team with this just yet. Even if I wanted to, they would all ask how I deduced all of this without insider knowledge, and then when I couldn’t find an excuse as to how I knew all of this, it would only raise more unwanted questions. I wasn’t ready for my whole sex life to be laid out for my friends just yet. Sorry.

* * *

When we arrived at the hotel, it was around eleven, or maybe half past. Everyone was exhausted. By the time Morgan and Emily finished reviewing some minor details with me, then said goodnight, I was already falling asleep. When the team had all locked themselves in their rooms, Hotch caught me by winging his arm under my shoulders, then carried me to our room where we immediately changed into our pajamas, then crashed onto the bed. It was probably a bad idea to go to sleep without getting ready, but I literally could not move anymore. All I could do was let Hotch pull me close to him so that we were spooning. His warm chest was pressed to my back, our knees were tucked and tangled together, and his cheek was pressed against mine.

“I hate these kinds of cases,” I admitted with my eyes closed.

“Why?”

“Because it’s all about sex… and it just creates a bad image for swingers and the BDSM scene.”

“We can’t control how other people view it.”

“I know.” There was silence for a moment while I wondered what I should say next. A random question popped into my head. “Do you ever consider it?” I asked quietly. He let out a confused hum in my ear. “Attending BDSM parties or swinger clubs.”

He tensed, his arms tightening around me so hard I thought I would crack if I breathed in too much. “No.”

“Why?”

“Because…” he drifted like I would know the answer. When I didn’t finish his sentence for him, he sighed, then continued with, “I like knowing you’re mine. I don’t feel like I have to prove myself by sharing you.”

“And BDSM parties?”

“Could you really see me going to one of those?” We both chuckled. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think that’s really my thing… Being with you and learning all of these things from you makes me feel safe and interested, but I feel like doing it in a group setting would be… awkward. What about you?”

“That used to be my thing,” I admitted. Hotch knew that I had a long, complicated past with sex, and I was far more experienced than he was, but it was something we hardly talked about like this. It would come up as reference sometimes, sure; but we never discussed it in detail like this. “But, I think that I wouldn’t have fun doing that stuff anymore. Like you said, it’s safe and fun doing all of these things with _you_. I’m yours. I don’t need other people to make me feel secure in our relationship.”

Hotch’s hold on me released. I sucked in a breath of relief, then turned to face him. I pressed a hand against his face. We stayed like that for a few minutes, staring into each other’s eyes, silently debating if there was anything more worth saying. Maybe there was. Maybe there wasn’t. It didn’t matter because I said what had been weighing on my mind, and now that it was all over with, I was fine with just laying there. Truth was, since Haley’s death, it took a long time for us to get intimate again—and I mean just beyond sex. It took Hotch forever to remember how to just stare at me in silence like this without looking away or checking his phone to make sure there weren’t any new cases. It wasn’t because he didn’t remember how to love me like this, but because he was scared to leap headfirst into it again after what happened. He had just lost Haley. He lost the woman he first fell in love with, the mother of his son, and it took him a long time to grieve that loss. But once it settled, he was left to just worry about me and Jack. He was so scared of losing us. He was terrified of losing us the same way I was afraid of losing him. Hotch’s focus was on protecting our family, and he felt that he couldn’t do it while laying in bed all day with me, doing nothing with his time. But now that he was back to being himself, we could spare moments like this.

Since Haley’s death, however, we hadn’t… well… we hadn’t done anything in relation to what we were discussing. Hotch didn’t even _look_ at the black box. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to get rough quite yet. Even though it had been seven months since Foyet stabbed him, I was worried about his injuries. I didn’t want him to push himself too hard. Besides, after just losing his ex-wife, he probably wasn’t too keen on the idea of tying me up and devoting hours of his time to torturing me. My hope was, however, that we would get back to how things were _eventually._ It didn’t have to be that very night, or the next; it didn’t even have to be in a week from then… But I loved Hotch and how he was as a Dominant. I loved how he could match my eagerness and control it with his words. I loved _him_ , and I knew that he loved putting me in my place. Someday, he would need to get all of his frustrations out, and I would be there, waiting obediently, giving him the chance to handle me however he saw fit.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you, too.” My thumb wiped over his cheekbone softly.

“I know you probably want me to start getting back into the habit of—”

“No, Aaron. I don’t expect anything from you if you’re not ready. And I don’t want you to do something just for me. Ever—”

“Well, sometimes it’s good to do things just for you,” he joked.

I giggled. “Fair.” My thumb found his bottom lip, so he kissed it. “I like how we are. I like the black box. I like being _yours_. But if you’re not ready for it yet, then you’re not ready for it. I’ll _never_ rush you. I swear.”

Hotch shuffled around on the bed so that he could hide his face against my chest. “I don’t deserve you.”

“That’s not true.”

“I feel like I don’t deserve you or your patience. I wish I could just turn off this feeling in me that wants to cry and scream at the top of my lungs. I wish that I could just…” He sighed heavily. “I think about it, you know. Especially with cases like this where sex comes up practically the entire time. I think about pinning you, and teasing you, and I think about the way you used to scream my name when it was all too much. I think about it, and I wish that I could just turn off this sadness within me so that I can do all of those things I know we’re dying to try again. But I can’t turn it off. And I fucking hate it. I _hate_ it, Y/N. Why can’t I control this one thing? Just once?”

“You can’t control everything, Aaron.”

“Yeah, but I could control that one thing. Always. No matter what was going on, I could just flip a switch, and suddenly I could…” He trailed off. “I like controlling you, and I like controlling what we do in bed. But, I can’t do that now—even though I _want_ to.”

“Baby, look at me,” I begged. I raised his face back up so that our glances could meet. “At. Your. Own. Pace.” He rolled his eyes. “You lost someone you love. You lost someone who means the world to you. Those wounds don’t heal overnight. Your body and your mind are a little pre-occupied with mourning, adjusting to raising Jack without her, and getting back to work with the team. Everything else is just taking a back burner right now, and that’s okay. One day, you’ll be able to flip that switch again. I know it. You’ll get that red glint in your eye that puts me in my place, and you’ll know exactly what to do with me and the black box. It’ll happen. But if you rush it, you’ll only just keep torturing yourself.”

Hotch hid his face against my chest again. His forehead was so warm. I could practically feel my heart beating against his touch, which only made me smile and hold him closer to me.

* * *

In the morning, Hotch and I got ready together just in time to hear a knock on our door. Hotch answered it while I fixed my hair. We went to sleep late last night. Usually, while we were off on cases, our nights were either spent at the precinct or being up all night in the hotel room while still working on the case, even though we were supposed to be setting the good example of getting sleep in order to refresh ourselves. But last night was different. We spent hours in bed, Hotch pressed against my chest, the two of us lying in silence between talking about things that were weighing on our minds. It was good. It felt good to be us again like that. But when morning came around, and we had to get ready to go back into work for another long day, I almost regretted staying up so late. Especially since Rossi had come to the door with news of a new crime scene matching our Unsub’s M.O., which meant that Morgan, Emily, and I were probably going to be sent there while Hotch, JJ, Reid, and Rossi got to sit down in a boardroom while gorging on donuts and coffee. I supposed I must have pulled the short straw with this case.

On our way to the newest crime scene, I discussed the details of what we knew with Emily and Morgan. The _idea_ was the same. A couple, tied up, the husband forced to take Viagra—only this time, things didn’t go how the Unsub had planned. The couple fought back. Before they were even out of their underwear, they put up a fight against the Unsub, which forced him to shoot them both, instead of stabbing the wife, which he liked doing in order to get back at his own (ex)wife. Since things went wrong with this couple, it was only a matter of time until the Unsub would spiral and snap. He would do something out of character. Desperate to satisfy his fantasy and urge to kill, our Unsub’s timeline was going to speed up, which meant that things were going to get dangerous _very_ fast.

At the crime scene, CSU was already done inside, rolling the bodies out with the M.E. so that she could perform autopsies back at the morgue. Morgan stopped her, though. Emily and I collided as she froze in her path to see what caught Morgan’s attention, but when I saw what it was, too, I suddenly understood their reactions. Bruises. Everywhere. On the husband, both of his legs—crotch to toes—were covered with bruises that looked fresh. That wasn’t something you would see every day.

“He was an MMA fighter,” Morgan noted. I cocked a brow at him. “These bruises are a result of the fight the victims had with the Unsub. But, think about it, their hands were tied, so he had to use what was available to him. His legs. Only someone with full contact training would be able to put up a fight like this, though.”

We all exchanged unsure glances. After a moment, I decided that I wanted to take a look inside, to see if there were any evidence confirming Morgan’s theory, or if there was another explanation to all of this. Morgan and Emily followed.

When we stepped into the bedroom, I nearly slipped on a pile of broken glass. It was an absolute mess in there, showing clear signs of a struggle, which we knew and expected. But this was crazy. For two people who were tied up, it was a wonder that they managed to put up a fight at all. Why didn’t the Unsub just shoot them immediately? Why wait—The ritual… He was holding out hope that he could still get them under control, then complete his ritual in order to help satisfy his urges. The broken glass, the broken bedside table, the shattered TV across from the bed, and the ripped drapes were all signs of a struggle that got way out of hand, so the Unsub gave up and decided to shoot them both.

“This is weird,” Emily said hesitantly. I turned in time to see her staring at the pool of blood on the floor that marked where the wife had been shot. She stood over the blood, straddling the stain. “Look at the footprints on the floor.” She pointed to the bloody and muddy footprints just in front of her, pointing in her direction.

“Boots,” I noted.

“The Unsub stood right there when he killed the wife.”

“Maybe she was going for the gun,” Morgan hypothesized after looking through the other bedside table where the top drawer was open. “When she made a run for it, the Unsub had no choice but to shoot her.”

“But he was already standing in her away, according to the footprints,” I said.

“And there was a muzzle burn on her chest,” Emily added. “She shot her at point-blank range—execution style.”

“Why would she let him do that? Why wouldn’t she run away?” Morgan asked.

“She gave herself to the Unsub.”

“Why would she do that?”

“To save herself,” I answered quietly from the other side of the room. They turned to eye me suspiciously. “If you meet someone and think that you’re in for a night of sex with them, you know what their motives and interests are. She just saw that her husband was murdered because he refused to give into the Unsub’s sexual fantasy of watching them _do it_ together. So, she tries to survive by offering herself to him in the hopes that sex will save her life.”

“So, then it was definitely someone they felt comfortable having a threesome with,” Emily said. “The Unsub is someone they trusted.”

“I think we need to start putting the pieces together with the swinger angle.”

So, as we made our way back into the car, we started putting the pieces of the profile together entirely. This was everything we knew about our Unsub now because of this escalation: He was an emasculated alpha male. No doubt about it. Each and every one of his crime scenes was him trying to prove that he was the superior male in the room—which also fit the swinger idea. But something in his personal life, probably related to the swinging scene, made him feel like less of a man, and now he was taking it out on other couples. Like with most Unsubs, this man’s ritual was everything to him. Having the ritual of setting the mood, having the women tie the men up, then the Unsub tying the women up, watching them have sex, then shooting the husbands before stabbing the wife was all imperative to his psychosis. It was how he maintained his dominance in the situation—probably the only dominance he had at all in the world. His ability to dominate these couples with his violence was getting him off, hence the urge to continue killing, and to continue the chaos. When he couldn’t get that relief with our most recent victims, he simply shot them so that he could move on. Now that the fantasy had finally failed him, he was entirely decompensating. If he had a job, it was likely that he would go in and start shooting there. If he only had a place of worship, he would take a gun there. If he had no other choice, he would pick any random public space to start shooting. With this recent couple, he had proven to himself that the theatrics weren’t necessary. What _was_ necessary was the body count. The more, the merrier.

Because the team was already presenting that profile to the local police, there was no point in going back there. So, Hotch wanted us to find someone in the swinger community who could help us put all of the pieces together. Obviously, the swinging scene wasn’t exactly something any of us were familiar with—even Rossi didn’t know too much. To much of Emily and Morgan’s shock, however, it wasn’t hard to find someone we could reach out to. With a simple Google search, I found the name of a swinger club hostess: Sarah Michaels. Her and her husband lived just a few blocks away from the crime scene, and they hosted a fairly popular event for people around our Unsub’s age, which made them the perfect consults. So, we called Garcia for an address, then headed there.

I drove with Emily in the front seat and Morgan in the back, both of them quietly reviewing the finalized profile we were given by the team over the phone just as we got in the car. We helped with what we could, but most of it was already there, and there were other things running through my mind that I hadn’t said because it conflicted with everything Hotch and Reid put together at the office. It was still irking me, though.

Emily knocked on the door when we arrived at the Michaels’ house. I waited behind them, staring at the concrete step I was on, lost in thought about this Unsub and what Hotch said last night. Who knew that teaching him about BDSM would ultimately torture _him_? That wasn’t my intention originally, and it certainly wasn’t my intention now, which he had to know after we talked last night about how we weren’t in any rush. Hotch used to be really good about switching in and out of Dom space with ease, but I normally attributed that to his job where he already had to be dominant. Now, though, I was sure that it had to do with—

“Hi,” Emily greeted, “we’re looking for a Sarah Michaels… We’re told that she, uh, hosts a Fun, Free, and over Forty event at this address?”

Emily seemed so shy while talking about this stuff. It was funny to me that everyone expected Rossi and Reid to know plenty about this stuff (for different reasons, obviously), but no one noticed how shy Hotch, Em, and I were. I was shy because I didn’t want people poking their noses in mine and Hotch’s unconventional relationship; but that was how I knew exactly why Emily was shy about it, too. She was a private person. She didn’t let _anyone_ know what was ever going on with her. But she was surrounded by profilers, therefore, it was hard to hide most things from us—especially when it came to things I could understand.

The woman smiled. “Yes. I’m Sarah Michaels. Come in. Please.” She stepped to the side so that we could be ushered in. Morgan, Emily, and I smiled as we passed by here. “What can I help you agents with?”

“We’re investigating a series of crimes we believe have to do with a suspect who participates in the swinging scene,” I answered.

“Oh, well, then you’ve certainly come to the right place for help.” She closed the door behind us. “Paul!” she called for her husband. Afterwards, she led us to the living room and invited us to take a seat. After another moment, her husband walked in. “Paul, these lovely people are agents from the FBI.”

“Hello,” Paul said while taking a seat next to Sarah.

“What is it exactly that you’d like to know about, then?”

Emily and I glanced to each other for a signal to take the lead, so I nodded to her with a brief smile. Emily looked to Sarah. “Our suspect, we’re assuming that he’s a swinger who’s tricking his…” she was at a loss for words.

“Scene partners?”

“Sure. We think that he’s tricking his scene partners into trusting him, then killing them.”

“How awful,” Phil commented.

“Do you know who his partner is?” Sarah inquired.

“P—Partner?” Emily stuttered through her confusion.

“For when he comes to the parties. He has to bring a female companion, or he wouldn’t get in the door. Swing clubs are a matriarchy. My primary goal as hostess is to make sure that other women feel safe and secure here. There has to be at least as many women as men. So, if this man you’re looking for is really a swinger, then he would need a female partner.”

Well, we hadn’t considered that our Unsub was still with someone. Based on the crime scenes, we figured that we were looking for a single man who had recently gotten out of a marriage for one reason or another. We didn’t think that they were still together. But now that we were somewhat sure that he was meeting his victims through swing parties and clubs, our profile had to change based on his relationship. That wasn’t to say that his wife was involved in the murders, though. To the contrary. We knew that he was doing this because of his failings sexually and romantically. There was no proof that a female partner would be there to help complete his family. However, this new information gave us knowledge into what the Unsub’s goal was in all of this. He wanted to prove to his wife that he was the alpha. He wanted to find a way to please her again, so he was using surrogates in order to find that fire again.

“Well, so, then how is it that he’s ending up with a couple all on his own?” Emily asked.

“He comes with a female companion,” Phil said, “then, he sends her off with a couple, and she sends him off with a couple.”

Morgan’s confusion grew on his face. “Wait, wait, wait… I don’t understand.”

“The consensual cheating gets them off,” I told Morgan. “They go off to do their own things, proving to other people their dominance or submission, then, when they return home, they… you know… prove it to each other. They prove that no one can do it like they can. It’s so that the male can prove that he’s better than all the other males.”

“Until his impotency prevented him from making that point any longer,” Emily said. “She must have found someone better, which is why he snapped.”

“But he still has to get into these parties with a woman.”

“It depends on the party or club,” Sarah said. “Most swinger events are in agreement about the matriarchy, but if they know you well enough— like you’re a reliable, familiar face— they might let you in on your word that your partner is showing up later.”

If the Unsub wasn’t with his wife anymore because of swinging, it would make sense why he was attacking couples and overkilling the women with knives. The more we learned about this lead, the more viable it was. If all of this was because of his wife, though, that meant that when this would inevitably spiral, his end game would be going after his wife to satisfy his rage against her. With four couples dead, it was possible that his lust for blood was dying out—especially since his last victims fought back, ruining the fantasy for him. When the lust would diminish, that was when he would go for his wife. That would be sooner than later.

Morgan finished up our conversation with the Michaels’ with niceties. The second it was polite to leave, the three of us hurried back to the precinct to tell the team everything we knew. It was mid to late afternoon already. By the time we ordered lunch for the team, picked it up, then got it back to the precinct, everyone was exhausted. My energy bar had run out, and I was ready to just crash and go back to bed. Unfortunately, it seemed like we were going to be pulling an all-nighter. Telling by the setup the team already had in the boardroom when Emily, Morgan, and I arrived, no one was planning on going back to the hotel that night.

And that was exactly what ended up happening. Everyone plowed through their sandwiches while Morgan and Emily presented everything we had so that we could keep building the profile. Only, my mind was elsewhere. I wasn’t sure why it was so hard to focus during this case. There were times where I felt like I could keep working for days without getting distracted, but then, like someone was flicking a switch on and off in my head, I would be distant. It was like I was somewhere else. I could forget where I was, what we were doing, and why we were doing it. I was just… there. I didn’t move or say anything. I didn’t even think about something else. It was like I was a shell with nothing inside.

Hotch cupped his hand over my knee. I jolted awake from my drifted moment so that I could look at him and remember where I was, what we were doing, and why we were doing it. The team was still talking about the case and the profile. I had already missed the majority of it, so there was no point in trying to catch myself up now. But Hotch noticed me. He noticed that something was wrong.

“Where did you go just now?” he whispered, massaging his thumb against my kneecap. I shook my head. “Come on.” He grabbed my hand.

I watched him push himself out of his chair with his free hand, and then he tugged at me, a silent signal that he wanted me to follow him. I sighed and did so. We left the boardroom silently, ignoring the way everyone was staring at us. We stepped into the next room over, which was the break room, which was entirely empty, and the blinds were already closed. The second the door slammed shut behind me, Hotch enveloped me in a hug. I found myself immediately relaxing in his arms. I couldn’t find the strength to wrap my arms around his buff chest, but I found just enough strength to hide my face in his shirt. I inhaled. Cinnamon. Pine. He smelled so good.

“I’m okay,” I insisted, my voice muffled against his chest.

“I know. I think we just need this.”

I exhaled deeply, my breath warming his clothed chest. “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay.” I just had to keep reminding myself of that. “Jack’s okay. You’re okay… We’re okay.”

After another few minutes of us standing like that in silence, Hotch and I finally parted. When I looked up at him, he leaned down to kiss me, and I kissed him back to show that I was grateful for him, because he was the only one who noticed that something was still wrong, and he took time to be with me instead of overseeing the team.

This was breaking every rule we had made for ourselves. We weren’t supposed to be doing anything like this while we were at work. But, honestly since we broke that rule in his office when we made up six months ago, our rules didn’t matter much. Besides, we created the rules in the first place because when we first started dating, no one knew about us, and we wanted to keep it that way; but once the Fisher King revealed our secret, the rules became more about not making things awkward for our co-workers. It had been two years, though. At this point, Morgan, JJ, and Emily all knew just how serious Hotch and I were, and everyone else probably just assumed. If anyone was uncomfortable with our relationship at this point, it really didn’t matter. Hotch and I had been through too much to just give up now for no reason. Our rules were just as pointless as listening to other people’s opinions.

“You ready to go back in?” he asked. He kept my head tilted up by supporting my chin with his thumb. I nodded lightly. “Okay.” He leaned in again. “I love you.” He kissed me so gingerly, I barely even felt his lips at all.

I raised myself up on my toes to kiss him with more force. “I love you, too.”

“We will be okay eventually. I promise.”

“I just want this to pass already.”

“I know.”

“When we get home, I just want to hold Jack… I don’t care what calls come in for a new case… I just want to hold my little man a little longer.” I brushed my fingers through his hair. “Maybe we aren’t ready to come back to work yet.”

“You’ve been back for three months and you haven’t said anything before.”

“I just need a week.”

Hotch nodded understandingly. “Alright.” He opened the door and led me back into the boardroom.

Another few hours passed as we kept working on the case. Rossi offered to buy dinner for all of us, then even took the opportunity to take a break by going to pick it up himself. When he got back, we all ate while talking about life instead of work. Everyone knew better than to ask me and Hotch questions. Asking something stupid like, “How are you guys?” and “How’s Jack?” was futile because we didn’t have answers. Even if we did, we wouldn’t want to talk about it. Everyone else’s lives were busy, though, which meant that they all had plenty to talk about. That was, until Hotch got a call. The room fell silent so that we could all dictate whether or not it had anything to do with the case.

As Hotch hung up the phone, we could all see how defeated his face was, which confirmed what we already knew. Morgan, Emily, and I grabbed our things from the desk and the back of our chairs, then headed out, leaving the team to sit in silence for another few moments to contemplate before Hotch would inevitably tell them to get back to work. We weren’t sure how bad it was. There was no point in asking Hotch for details when we would get to see it for ourselves first hand, but… there was something eerie about his silence following that call. This wasn’t just another crime scene. This wasn’t just another couple. Something tragic happened. Something that could have been prevented happened because we were too late. If we didn’t catch up to our Unsub soon, Hotch was going to have a fit.

Since Haley’s death, Hotch had been _angry_. He was sad most of the time when he was around Jack, or even when he was with me in private because he didn’t want to scare me off again—but at work, and when he thought he was alone in his office at the BAU or at home, he was angry. At home, he threw papers everywhere, and he would punch the wall occasionally. He tried to hide it by putting makeup over his knuckles since band aids would be too obvious. At work, when he was holed up in his office, I could hear him ranting to himself or yelling on the phone. On cases, if something wasn’t going right, it was easy for him to spiral. So, if this ended up being bad, I knew that this was going to take a turn for the worst—not just with Hotch, but with the Unsub, too.

When we arrived, I heard Emily immediately start talking to the lead witness who was hosting the swingers party where the shooting took place. Her name was Leslie Sanders. She was crying while answering all of Emily’s questions, but my mind was already wandering. There was a mention of the Unsub’s name: James. Then, after a moment, I heard that she was in the playroom with her friend when he broke in and started shooting. My feet floated to the door. She had let him into the party because she recognized him and insisted that his wife was coming. While he ventured off for a reason to snap, she turned down the same hallway on the left that I was taking, which led to the playroom she referenced. I stopped to look at the door. Confusion coursed through my mind as I crouched to look at the lock and the hinges. Nothing was broken. There was no sign of a forced entry. That didn’t make sense, of course, because she said that she locked herself in there, as most people do when they want to have a private scene during one of these parties. There were rules, right. Open door meant anyone could walk in or join, a half open door required an invitation to enter, and a completely closed or locked door meant that whoever was inside didn’t want to be bothered. She didn’t want to be bothered, so the door was locked. If that were true, then how they hell did he get in without kicking the door down like Morgan enjoyed doing?

“What is it?” Morgan asked from behind me.

I jumped to my feet, then played off my fright by just pointing to the lock before meandering further into the room. The last victim of the night was still on the bed in the playroom. As Morgan investigated the lock further, I pulled the sheet on the body down so that I could get a look for myself. They were on the bed together when James came in. She was tied to the bed, the victim hovering over her. When they heard the shooting start, he got up to look to make sure the door was locked, then returned to untie her. By the time he got one hand free, James had already managed to open the door somehow, shoot the male victim, then leave the house before anyone could catch him. He didn’t shoot any women. Despite entering and spraying bullets at random, he purposefully didn’t kill any women. She was tied to the bed, a perfect victim, yet he left her. Why? Why the change in M.O.? What made him snap like this? What made him change his interest in couples? Before, he had no troubles with killing the women, too, but at this party, he was controlled with his victim choice.

This wasn’t about his wife. This was about the man who came between them. We needed to be looking for this _James_ with a wife who left him for someone else in the swinger scene.

“He picked the lock,” Morgan said. I turned to face him after covering the body again. “Why take the time to pick the lock instead of just kicking it down or shooting it?”

“Habit.”

“Exactly. But this is a deadbolt—which takes expertise to pick.”

“Then, we’re looking for a locksmith,” I said quietly.

Morgan raised a brow at me. “What’s wrong?”

“I knew this was coming, Derek… I profiled that he would spiral, but I didn’t say anything to anyone, even though I should have.”

“We all knew that he was going to spiral, Y/N, you didn’t have to warn us of that.”

“No, I mean—” I sighed. “ _I_ fucked up the profile by making it about the wife, even though that’s clearly not who he’s angry with, and _I_ kept a piece out of it that could have helped change our profile in order to get ahead of this guy.” I pouted at him. “I think I’m losing my touch.”

He scoffed at me. I raised a curious, yet offended brow at his response. It seemed like he couldn’t believe what I had just said; but it made sense, right? After being out of the field so long, maybe I lost “my thing”. Gideon hired me originally because of my talent for spotting things quickly. Spotting them was different than understanding them, though, which was why I relied on the team to help me put all the pieces together—just as they relied on me for things, too. That was the point of working as a team. We all contributed to something. But what was the point of my contribution if I was just going to fuck everything up?

“You’ve been back for three months, sunshine, and this is the _first_ time you made a mistake… and you… think that doesn’t make you a good profiler anymore?” Morgan scoffed again. “I know you’re smarter than that, Y/N. We all make mistakes. We all think we know what’s best, so we keep things to ourselves sometimes. Even if you would have mentioned that he was going to spiral like this, it wouldn’t have changed anything. You’re just using this as an excuse to blame yourself for something else. For Haley.”

“I don’t blame myself for Haley,” I insisted quickly.

“Maybe not directly. But you’ve been different since Foyet stabbed Hotch—”

“Do you think that I shouldn’t blame myself for how things went down? We told him to go home, Derek. I told him that I would be home soon, and then… by the time we were leaving the office, Foyet was already—” I choked back on a sob. “I should have been there… I could have stopped him. If I stopped him then, Jack and Haley would have never left, Sam would still be alive, and Haley—”

A tear slid down my cheek, catching me off guard. Six months still didn’t heal some wounds. I sucked in a brave breath to hold back the tears, to stop myself from breaking down at a crime scene. I hadn’t cried in weeks. There were times I thought about it now, but I didn’t cry. I had gotten everything out of my system a long time ago. But now that someone was finally confronting me about how I felt about all of it, it was hitting me like a train.

“We’ve talked about this before,” Morgan continued after a silent moment. “If you were there, you know that Foyet would have just killed you. He wanted to toy with Hotch, not you. In order to tear Hotch’s world apart, he would have killed you without a second thought, then held it against Hotch to make it worse. You’re alive because you didn’t go. Hotch has someone to lean on now and help him get through all of this because you stayed at the office longer than you were supposed to. Fate is funny like that sometimes. Don’t take your life for granted, Y/N, and don’t spend it blaming yourself and regretting things you had no control over. It’s in the past, rose. There’s nothing you can do about it now. But, you know what you _can_ do? Be there for Hotch. Be there for Jack. You get to go home and be a family once this case is over. Isn’t that what you want?”

I nodded.

“Okay. So, stop blaming yourself for something stupid, and let’s just find this guy so that we can get you two home to your son.”

I let a small smile escape me. “I hate it when you’re right.”

“I know. And I hate it when you tell yourself these lies. So, I guess we can’t all be winners.”

“Hey!” I hit his arm in protest.

Morgan laughed while rubbing the sore spot on his bicep. “I’m going to call Garcia about locksmiths named James in the area. In the meantime, _Greenaway_ , you need to get your shit together and be the badass profiler I know you are. Think you can do that?”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

He pinched my chin lightly. “I love you. Even when you’re being stupid.”

“Ha. Ha. Go call your wifey, _chocolate thunder._ ” I started pushing him out of the room.

“I’m going to tell her you said that,” he threatened playfully. “She gets jealous, you know that—” I kept pushing him towards the front door. When he stumbled out onto the patio, he threw his hands up in surrender. “Alright, alright, I get it.” He laughed and walked off on his own to call Garcia.

Meanwhile, Emily approached me. “You seem better,” she said. I nodded. “Did he finally knock some sense into you?”

I chortled and switched my gaze to the ground. “Yeah.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Garcia takes it into the end zone once more,” Derek cheered lightly with a smile while approaching me and Emily again. “The Unsub’s name is James Thomas. He’s a freelance locksmith in the area, and he had prostate surgery a year ago to remove a cancerous tumor.”

“Well, that certainly checks all of the boxes. James, locksmith, impotent,” Emily said.

I nodded. “Good enough for me. Arrest warrant?”

“Hotch has it. We’re supposed to meet them and a SWAT team at his house.”

The three of us raced to the car so that we could do just that.

When we arrived at the apartment building where James Thomas lived, we spotted the SWAT team that was gearing up while Hotch started spouting orders around. Emily grabbed three vests from the back of the car we arrived in just before we started heading over to meet everyone else. I caught the vest Em threw at me. While sliding it over my head, then fiddling with the velcro straps, Hotch kept commanding the SWAT team. For a short moment, he stopped to tell Morgan that he would take the lead going in since he had experience leading SWAT and infiltration.

Once all of the orders were given, Hotch and Morgan didn’t hesitate to start leading everyone inside. I wasn’t quite sure why we needed an entire fucking army in order to take down one guy—but, then again, he was spiraling, so I supposed it was better to be safe than sorry.

“FBI! We’re coming in!” Morgan warned with only a millisecond to spare before he kicked down the door. The second there was space to move in, Hotch and I filed in. “FBI!” Morgan called out again.

The SWAT team ventured down the hallway to our left where all of the bedrooms were to make sure that no one was hiding back there. Emily and Reid went to clear the living room, meanwhile, Morgan, Hotch, and I were leaning over the kitchen window to see a woman crouched down in front of the oven, her hands surrendered in the air, her head bowed low out of fright.

“Who are you?” Hotch interrogated the woman on the ground.

“Maryann Thomas!” she answered quickly. “What’s this about?”

“Where’s your husband?” I asked.

“I don’t know! He left for work this morning. I haven’t seen him since then. _Please_ , what’s this about?”

“We need your help finding him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s wanted for the murder of twenty people,” Hotch answered gruffly. “Stand up with your hands in the air.”

Mrs. Thomas sobbed quietly as she struggled to push herself to her feet, then lifted her hands in the air as Hotch ordered while she turned around. My stance and aim wavered. She was pregnant, and by the looks of it, she was close to her due date. That didn’t make sense, though, because we had just learned that James Thomas had his prostate removed a year ago— _Oh_. The rest of the team slowly lowered their weapons, too, when they came to the same realization I had already come to. They were a bit slow with these things sometimes.

“Prentiss, Y/N…” Hotch mumbled while holstering his weapon. “Take the lead.”

Emily and I both nodded, then, as the rest of the team started filing out of the apartment quietly, we asked Mrs. Thomas to sit down at the dining room table. As she did so, I took off my vest and offered to get her a glass of water, if she needed it. She shook her head. Emily sat down across from her after handing me her vest so that we could be more comfortable and look less official in order to calm Mrs. Thomas down. She was our only link now. We needed her to cooperate so that we could get an idea as to where her husband was. Even if she didn’t actively know where he was, there was some part of her that would have an idea, no matter how far the stretch was.

Mrs. Thomas refused to look up at us or take her hands off of her baby bump while we started to explain everything to her. She was silent for the most part. Until Emily started accusing her of potentially having something to do with all of this—though we knew that wasn’t the case— she seemed fairly willing to help us in order to find her husband, if nothing else. But after that, she started insisting that her and her husband weren’t murderers. She immediately closed herself off.

I sighed. “Mrs. Thomas, with all due respect, your husband waltzed into Leslie Sanders’s house, then shot up the place, killing eight people—and he won’t stop there.”

“James is not a bad guy!” she defended urgently. She wasn’t angry or flustered as I would have expected her to be. In fact, she seemed pretty calm, all things considered. It was almost like she was expecting this. Or at least expecting that something would inevitably go wrong with her husband and their relationship. “He didn’t do any of this.”

“But, he did, Maryanne,” Emily said. “He did it to lash out because he’s not the father of your child.”

“Yes, he is!”

“He had prostate surgery over a year ago. There’s no way he could biologically be the father of your child,” I said.

“Biology doesn’t matter to us. He’s still the father of our child.”

“Maryanne—” Before I could continue, Hotch opened the front door in order to wave Emily and I out of the apartment room. I sighed. “Fine…” I patted the table as I stood up. Emily and I entered the hallway silently, and she closed the door behind her. “What is it?”

Reid shuffled on the balls of his feet while sorting through a stack of files in his hands. “I’m going to try a new approach.”

“I thought we were in agreement that having men talk to her wouldn’t work,” I told Hotch.

“She might listen to a submissive male figure, though,” Reid corrected without even blinking an eye. I stared at him. He looked up at me. “What?” I shook my head. Reid kept staring back at me as he continued, “I just need a few minutes.” He passed me and entered the apartment.

The hallway was drowning in silence when Reid started questioning Mrs. Thomas inside. We could hear their muffled voices, some words standing out more than others, but we couldn’t hear most of it. Yet, there was nothing to be said between those of us standing around. It only took about a minute until we heard shuffling inside, and then the door opened. Reid promised that it wouldn’t take long, and he held true to his word—even managing to beat his promise, which was nice of him.

“She just identified the father,” Reid said urgently while racing into the hallway. We all turned to face him. “He was a swinger, like we thought, and they had a threesome with him over a year ago.”

“Probably just before his surgery,” I noted.

Reid nodded. “At the time, it was probably just like swinging with anyone else. But he proved to be a better partner, so when James couldn’t have sex anymore, she started cheating on him with the man she saw as superior.”

“Y/N,” Hotch whispered, “I want you to go in again. Now that we know the truth, I think you might be able to connect with her and get her to tell us where her husband is.”

“Why me?” I whispered back.

“You know…”

I gulped when his fingers danced over the back of my hand. I cleared my throat and snatched my hand away before anyone on the team could see. “Okay. Keep everyone out here.”

Hotch nodded an agreement.

As I entered the Thomas’ residence again, this time alone, I gathered my courage while trying to sort out what I was going to say. Hotch had sent me in because Reid was the submissive male figure that Maryanne could open up to, but I was the submissive female figure that she could connect to. I understood her devotion to her husband. I understood that as her Dominant, James had commanded all loyalty and respect from her. While Hotch and I operated on an equal playing field on all things except for the bedroom, Maryanne and James had a vastly different relationship. In every aspect of their life, he was superior. Though Hotch and I weren’t like that, I had been in her shoes before, and I knew exactly how limitless her loyalty was. If she wasn’t going to tell a Bureaucrat the truth, maybe she would tell me if I opened up and related to her.

“I don’t know what you want from me now…” she whispered in defeat.

“I just want to talk,” I answered. As I sat down across from her, Hotch closed the front door to keep the team from listening. “I know you don’t want to give your husband up. And I know exactly why… But…” I hesitated as I blushed. “That man who just closed the door, I’d do anything for him. _Anything_. I understand that you feel the same way about James.”

“You don’t know anything about our relationship,” she bit.

“Actually, I do. I know everything about it because we’re just like you.”

Maryanne looked up. “What?”

“Like I said, I’d do _anything_ for him. Do you understand?”

She nodded vaguely. “Yes.”

“We have a son at home, too. And I know that if anything were to happen to either of them, it would destroy me. But I would only feel that way because I know that my boyfriend’s a good man, and that we’re racing a wonderful boy. Your husband isn’t a good man. He isn’t going to raise your son the way you want. He’ll only turn your son into what he is, too. Don’t give him that chance, Maryanne. If you want to protect your son, you _have_ to tell us where your husband is.”

“I told you guys I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how many more times I can say it.”

“Okay. Fine. You don’t know where he is… Okay… But, if you were to call him, do you think that you could get him to tell you?”

Maryanne froze. I struck a chord when I mentioned Jack and her son. I thought that I’d have to take the Dominant/submissive approach, like Hotch wanted, but Reid got through to her by talking about the father of her child. Therefore, I had to give using her son as encouragement a shot. Just to see if it would help. And it did. It worked because mothers always worry about their children over all else… Since Haley’s death, Jack was all I could think about. It killed me to leave him at home because I was terrified of another Foyet coming along just to take our little man from us this time. My worry had to mimic Maryanne Thomas’s. I just knew it.

“I can try,” she finally said. I smiled and handed her the house phone between us. Mrs. Thomas dialed her husband’s number, then brought the phone to her ear. A few seconds passed as the phone rang. “He didn’t answer.” She put the phone down in front of her. “Sorry.”

“Do you have any idea as to where he would go?” I questioned.

Mrs. Thomas stayed silent for a moment while pondering. I could see her mind working overtime to put together pieces of a puzzle in her head, to figure out one place they both knew where she would go to hide out. And then a lightbulb dinged in her head. Her eyes brightened. “Before… Before I got pregnant, we used to do this thing at a local bar.”

“What would you do?”

“I would go in first, then wait at the bar for a few guys to approach me. I’d flirt with them, but ultimately turn all of them down until James would come over and pretend to pick me up. It was exciting. It made it feel like we were meeting all over again. If he’s really looking for a way to connect with me again, like you said, he _might_ have gone there. But I don’t know for sure.”

“What’s the name of the bar?”

“Dunley’s.”

The second the name left her mouth, I was already running to the door, calling Hotch’s name. The door opened so that I could hurry into the hallway. “We’ve got a lead. Dunley’s.”

“Reid, Rossi, Prentiss, stay here with Mrs. Thomas. Morgan, come with us,” Hotch ordered.

Rossi and Reid nodded before entering the apartment again, giving the remaining four of us space to run through the hallway and make it out of the apartment building. The SWAT team was waiting outside by their van, so Hotch told them where we were heading, then we all jumped into our designated cars, and started driving to Dunley’s.

Funnily enough, Dunley’s was hosting a swingers event, which was disguised as a plain, old couple’s night. Perhaps that was why the Thomas’ liked that bar so much, and that was why James chose this as his end game. It was natural for humans to go back to their roots. He probably felt like he had to go somewhere familiar in order to stop his spiraling, but, unfortunately, he was already too far gone. Watching all of the couples inside having fun, drinking, flirting, and leaving with other people was only going to upset him. If we were to just storm in immediately and attempt to arrest James inside, he was going to panic and attempt to shoot his way out. Despite the fact that it wouldn’t work, he would still try and he would still end up hurting someone—or worst, _killing_ someone. And if that someone were Hotch or Morgan… No.

We were going to need a distraction. A thought came to mind, one that Hotch wouldn’t like because it would hit a little too close to him, but I felt like we had no other choice. He asked for my opinion on this. I was sure that this was the only way. So, I peeled off my suit jacket, handing it to a very confused Morgan, then I pulled my shirt down so that my breasts were showing off more. Hotch cocked a brow. I ignored him as I adjusted my hair to make it look more sleek and sexy. After another moment of me changing my appearance, the realization dawned on Hotch, earning me a stern glare that told me he wasn’t going to allow it.

“I can’t get in on my own,” I commented as a reassurance. However, I don’t think it helped my case much. “It’s a swingers party—”

“I know what it is,” Hotch growled quietly.

I squinted at him. “If we just go in there, catch his attention, then lure him out, we can arrest him without any casualties.” I hesitated for a moment while gauging Hotch’s impression of my idea. “We can’t let him kill anyone else.”

Hotch’s shoulders fell in defeat because he knew that I was right, and there was no argument he could think up. “Okay.” He nodded his agreement, then peeled off his jacket, too, and gave it to Morgan. He undid the cufflinks of his dress shirt before rolling them halfway up his forearms. “We go in there, take a few minutes to make it look casual, then we approach him—”

“He’ll listen to me over you.”

“Fine. _You’ll_ go talk to him. Just… get him to leave with us.”

As if I didn’t fucking know that already. Geez. The whole point of this was to lure him away, Hotch didn’t have to remind me of that. “I’ve got this.”

“I know you do,” he said, pulling his tie off his neck before popping the top button of his shirt open. I gulped. “Let’s go.” He took my hand. “Morgan, the second we’re outside, you need to give us back up.”

Morgan still looked really confused. Truth was, Hotch and I knew each other so well at this point that we understood things that didn’t have to be said, or things that couldn’t be said. Others didn’t share that bond with us, though. Morgan was out of the know on this, unfortunately, but there really wasn’t enough time to explain it all to him. Really, all he needed to do was just wait outside. Wait and arrest James. That was all.

At the door, the bouncer was making sure that everyone entering was part of a relationship. There was a relationship of two men and one woman trying to enter the club ahead of us, a poly triad was what they called themselves. Hotch cocked a brow. I wanted to laugh and poke his dimple because he was so cute when he was confused and oblivious to the larger world out there. He would be so lost without me. Eventually, I would have to explain that part of life to him, and how there were all kinds of polyamorous relationships, which would end up being a very long conversation, just like the time we reviewed everything in the black box together.

When we managed to get inside the club, I immediately clocked James sitting over at the bar, drinking all by himself. If they were only letting couples into the bar, I wasn’t entirely sure how he got in. Best guess, he weaseled in, just like he did at Leslie Sanders’s party. Hotch led me to a table in the middle of the room, set in prime position for James to see us if we just impressed him enough. When I tried to take a seat in one of the chairs, Hotch tugged at my hand.

“Come here, baby girl.”

My heart fluttered in my chest. “What?” That was so out of pocket, yet I didn’t seem to mind. I was just confused as to why he did it in the first place.

“Come here,” he repeated while sitting down, then pulling me onto his lap. I was facing sideways. My knees were pressed together, my ankles crossed, my thighs resting on his thighs. His hands were holding onto my hip to make sure I wouldn’t slide off. Brushing my hair back, he whispered into my ear, “We’ve gotta put on a show.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Just be you…” He groaned lightly before nibbling on my earlobe. I melted. “Put your hands on my chest, baby girl.” I did as I was told. “Good girl.”

“Sir,” I croaked, turning to face him until my lips were hovering over his. “I miss this.”

He let out a shaky breath. “I do, too.”

I looked away from him before I could be tempted to kiss him, which would only encourage me to pull him into the bathroom and have him fuck me there. “I meant what I said the other night. I’m never going to rush you with this stuff, Aaron. That’s not who I am. My safety, wellbeing, and consent as your submissive is just as important as yours as a Dominant.”

“Hey,” he whispered, tilting my chin with his thumb so that I was looking at him. “Kiss me.” I tried to shift my eyes over to James, but Hotch kept me steady, then immediately pressed his lips against mine. I melted lightly. When he pulled away, he said, “I love you, Y/N.”

I kissed him again, this time with a little more passion until we were both tangling our fingers in each other’s hair, our hips grinding for more friction. “I love you,” I mumbled breathlessly against his lips.

He pulled back to catch his breath. “Y/N—” he stopped himself short, taking note of how everyone’s eyes were on us. Well, this hadn’t been a part of the plan, but it certainly worked, which meant we had the pick of the flock, including the one person we had come for. “Make your move. Now.” He patted my hips. As I stood, he made sure to grab my hand just to catch my attention again. “Stick to the plan for once.”

I smirked. “Yes, Sir.” I tugged my hand away from him gently and turned to approach James Thomas who was standing at the bar, drinking his way through a bottle of whiskey. For a party that was only letting couples in, James stuck out like a sore thumb since he was all alone. He happened to notice me the second I stood from Hotch’s lap, though, so he adjusted his posture to make himself more presentable for me. “You’re looking awfully… _lonely_ … over here,” I whispered seductively in his ear. He turned and smirked at me. I leaned back and took a seat beside him at the bar. “I saw you watching me and my husband.”

“Well, I think everyone’s been watching you guys.”

“I always tell him that it’s dangerous to bring me to these things because I just end up catching everyone’s eye, and then it’s impossible for us to decide who to… _pick_ out of the lot.”

James’s smile doubled. “So, you guys are in the scene.”

The term ‘scene’ was used ambiguously so that only someone with the context of swinging knew what he meant. If I understood his reference, I was in. If I didn’t, he was going to walk away. My nod was answer enough. Seeing that Hotch and I were looking to swing, and that I had approached him out of everyone in the bar, that caught his eye. He couldn’t resist that.

“How long have you two been married?” he asked.

“Only a few years.”

“Honeymoon phase?”

“Always.” I smirked and bit my lip.

He bit his lip, too, and looked around. “So, what are you and your husband into?” His gaze landed back on me when his question was finished. I paused. “Don’t play coy now.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to broadcast to the world what we’re into.”

He chuckled.

“Do you wanna get out of here with us?” I offered flirtatiously, making him think that there was more to it. James nodded. I smiled. “Okay.”

I looked over at Hotch and nodded towards the door, a reference that the plan had worked and that we were heading outside; however, to James, it looked like a gesture that was inviting Hotch to join us for other reasons. I started leading James out of the club. As Hotch met up with us just before the back door that led into the alley, I took his hand and squeezed—it was for the sake of appearances, alright… I supposed it didn’t hurt that it was a comfort to just feel him, the man I loved more than anything, after having to flirt with that horrible man following closely behind us.

We entered the alleyway, so Hotch and I tried to make our way towards the end where there was some light so that we could signal for the team to come help us arrest James peacefully. As we were walking, we were just a few steps in front of James, leading the way around. But, the sound of James’s footsteps stopped echoing through the alleyway, which meant that he had stopped following us. Curious, Hotch and I turned around simultaneously. What I saw next startled me. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but I saw how James’s attention was trained on Hotch, who was pushing me behind him to guard me. James was aiming a gun at Hotch’s forehead. Again, usually, I wouldn’t have batted an eye before pulling my weapon to try and shoot James first, but he had already steadied his aim, which gave him an advantage over us. And it was Hotch he was aiming at. Not me. I saw the end of his gun pointed directly at him, and flashes of Haley’s dead body on our carpet passed by me and the three gunshots that killed her echoed in my head. I couldn’t let that happen to Hotch. So, we had to keep playing dumb until we could send a signal to the team to let them know where we were so that they could come help.

“Why did you come directly to me?” he asked.

I answered quickly with, “Because we thought you would be fun—”

“No. Tell the truth.”

“I don’t know what you mean—”

“Stop lying!”

I heard the click of his gun cocking. Instinct took over, giving me no choice but to immediately draw my weapon from the waistband of my pants and fire it at James’s head. As the sound of my shot echoed throughout the alley, the music inside the bar stopped, the crowd immediately started dispersing as people were screaming, and James’s body fell to the ground. Hotch faltered, blinking as he tried to tell himself that he was okay. I wouldn’t let anything happen to him. Ever. James was about to shoot him. I had to make sure that I wouldn’t lose someone else in my life. Out of everyone, I just _couldn’t_ afford to lose Hotch. It was James or Hotch, so I made a choice.

I lowered my weapon and crouched down to press my index and middle fingers to James’s pulse, just to see if, by some miracle, he was still alive, even though I knew there was no way in hell he survived that. I gulped. There was no pulse as suspected; yet, I didn’t move back. I seemed to be frozen in place, though I wasn’t sure why.

“Are you okay?” Hotch questioned behind me. Before anything else could be said, I turned and tugged him towards me, throwing my arms around his shoulders and squeezing until it hurt. “Hey—” He sounded worried.

“He was going to shoot you,” I mumbled into his neck. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“I know.”

“He was going to—”

“I’m okay, baby.”

I curled my fingers around the ends of his hair. “I can’t lose you, too. I can’t do it.” I nuzzled my face against his neck in order to warm up my nose. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he responded, tightening his hold on me.


	37. DEVIL'S NIGHT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Mentions of death, torture, panic attack, PTSD-- everything Criminal Minds. Talk of sex, BDSM, Dom/sub relationship, etc.
> 
> TIMELINE: Season 6 Episode 06. Seven months after part thirty-six.

I huffed as more flour fell off the counter and landed on the tile floor of the kitchen. I promised Hotch that Jack and I would be clean, but it was getting increasingly hard to uphold my end of that deal as Jack tried to start a food fight. I was trying my hardest to not dip a finger into the sugar and drag it onto Jack’s nose. Despite the fact that Jack wanted to make these cookies in the first place, it seemed like I was doing all the work while he was trying to make the world’s biggest mess. Hotch definitely saw this coming. Which, in hindsight, was probably why he tried to warn me away from the task, but I wanted to spend some time with Jack doing something he was excited about. And this was that something. Unfortunately for me.

Jack had jumped onto our bed before we were awake, begging us to help him make some Halloween cookies. Hotch groaned and told him that we could just go buy some at the grocery store— but Jack was adamant that he wanted to make them homemade, just like Haley used to do. Hotch opened his eyes in an instant and looked at me, searching for help that I was refusing to give. I thought that it was a good idea, and if it was tradition, what was the harm. Hotch knew, though. The bastard knew and he didn’t warn me. I mean, he tried to tell me that if it got too messy, it would be my mess to clean up. When I told him, “Make me” after Jack left, Hotch warned that if I didn’t pick up after, then I’d have a problem walking tomorrow.

That threat was enough to convince me to try and baby Jack while we started gathering up all of the ingredients to make the cookies he wanted. It started fun and innocent, but the more bored Jack got with the process, the quicker he was to spiral into chaos. He thought it was funny to stick his hand into the bag of sugar and eat a handful of it. Not only did it just encourage his sugar high that had come with all the candy laying around the house, but it got _everywhere_. I tried to warn him to not do it again, but he got smart and started chugging the orange and black sprinkles. When I noticed what he was doing, I tickled him to loosen his grip around the bottle, then hid it on a shelf that was too high up for him to reach. Then, as we started rolling the dough, Jack kept trying to steal some to eat raw, which I told him wasn’t healthy, but he didn’t seem to care.

“It tastes good!” he had insisted after I squinted sternly at him.

When the cookies were finally in the oven and I managed to shoo Jack away so that he couldn’t find some way to burn down the house, I started cleaning up the mess we made. There was flour and sugar all over the counters, the floor, and, somehow, the wall. Jack had dropped a few sprinkles, too, but by some miracle, _most_ of them managed to make their way into his mouth before I stole them away. I wiped down the counters after sweeping up the floor first. When that was finished, I grabbed the cookie cutters to put away. Jack had wanted black cat and pumpkin shaped cookies, tossing the ghost shaped cutter to the side the moment he laid eyes on it.

Once the kitchen was clean, I had a few minutes to spare before the cookies would be done baking in the oven. Jack was out in the living room, watching a random Halloween movie; Hotch and Jessica were outside, decorating the house together while talking about Jack, probably. We had been away a lot recently, and Hotch was still worried about Jack since Haley’s death. Because Jessica spent more time with Jack than anyone else, it made sense for him to go to her about his son—

The kitchen timer dinged.

“Jack, go grab Dad and Aunt Jessica!” I called out.

I heard the TV turn off and the front door fly open as I leaned down with oven mitts on to grab the cookie sheet. I set the tray on a pair of hot pads on the counter and sighed while taking off the mitts. The cookies looked good, and they’d be fairly easy to decorate— especially since Jack was probably just going to spray orange and black frosting and sprinkles on them randomly before calling it a day.

Three pairs of footsteps echoed throughout the house, the front door closing behind the last one inside. In a minute, Jack came running up to me, and when he tried to touch the cookie sheet, I pulled his hands away with a warning that it was too hot. Jessica and Hotch walked in shortly after. Hotch hummed happily. I smiled at him to notice that he was taking in the scent of sugar cookies. My nose had grown accustomed to it, but Hotch notes aloud how good it smelled, and I said that it was all Jack’s doing. “And the mess?” Hotch had asked, gesturing to the _tiniest_ bit of sugar and sprinkles under the counter; to which, my smile disappeared, and I squinted at him. He only grinned. He was going to find any reason to tie me down to the bed.

When the cookies had cooled off, Hotch lifted Jack onto the kitchen island and handed him a container of frosting. I handed Jessica the sprinkles. I let her know that she was in charge of them, and not to give Jack the opportunity to throw them everywhere like confetti. She laughed and accepted responsibility if anything were to happen. I put the cookies on a few different paper plates so that the pumpkins and black cats were separated; also, that way Jack and Jessica had their own plates and Hotch and I had a plate to share.

Jack started with the orange frosting. As I suspected, he gripped the tubing with both of his fists, and he started squeezing as much on as he could, not even trying to stay on the cookie. Hotch had to steal it away before he could waste all of it. When we had the orange frosting, I started carefully decorating the two pumpkin shaped cookies we had. I was more careful about staying within the lines and making them look perfect. Jack, on the other hand, now had the black frosting, and he was going at it again, so Hotch had to step over to keep a careful eye on him and help teach him how to properly coat the cookies. I handed the orange frosting to Jessica when I was done with it. Next, I did the black cats. Jack was already biting down on one of his over-frosted cookies, getting crumbs all over his shirt and lap. Looked like it was going to be another random laundry day. That boy was lucky I loved him.

“Here,” I said to Hotch, picking up one of the pumpkin cookies and holding it out for him. He leaned down, taking a handless bite. “Disgusting.”

Hotch smirked while chewing. He snaked his arm around my waist and pulled my side to his chest before kissing my cheek. I leaned away after a moment because of the rough touch of the crumbs on his lips. I laughed at him before dragging my thumb across his lips to brush away the crumbs and frosting. Hotch gently caught my thumb in his mouth and licked off the food. I froze, biting back a moan because we were still around Jack, but I knew that Hotch could see it in my eyes.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you, too.” I gave him another bite.

* * *

The very next morning, we got a call that there was a case in Detroit that the BAU had been requested for. Two days from then was Halloween. We were supposed to go trick-or-treating with Jack that night, but we were never home in just one day. I mean, unless the Unsub was a complete idiot—or a kid, like what happened over two years ago when Elle left. The odds that we would be home on time to trick-or-treat with Jack was slim to none. It was going to break his heart. We were all so excited to be dressing up together. Since I had been going out with Hotch, we spent the past two Halloweens together. There was always a theme for the three of us. Jack liked it when our costumes all matched so that he could be closer with me and Hotch. This year’s theme was so good. Jack and I were the most excited about it, of course, whereas I think Hotch was just excited about being with Jack and seeing what I would look like in my costume. I didn’t blame him. It was a _really_ good costume. I knew that he was going to like it, but that was only if we got back on time.

Suddenly, Jack walked into our bedroom. The smile he had been wearing on his face slowly disappeared as he saw our half-packed go-bags sitting on the bed. I froze. Glancing between my bag and Jack, I realized how obvious this looked, and that this news was going to absolutely crush him. My initial hope was that I could head down to his bedroom, sit down on his bed with him, and explain that we were heading out for another case, and that we would try to race back as soon as possible. I wanted to break the news gently. However, now that he had just stormed in on us frantically packing up enough stuff for three days, there was no chance Jack was going to listen to anything we had to say.

“Jack—” I tried to start explaining, but he immediately spun around and ran back down the hallway. I looked at Hotch with a quivering lip. “Aaron…”

“I’ve got it.” Hotch leaned in to kiss my cheek on his way out of the bedroom.

When he was gone, I kept packing, though now my pace had slowed because of the guilt dragging me down. Once I had all of my clothes and toiletries neatly organized in my bag, I turned to finish putting Hotch’s stuff away so that we could leave when he was done talking to Jack. The guilt was still there. In fact, I think it only got heavier as I folded Hotch’s pajamas. It wasn’t fair to leave Jack, and we both knew that, but we also had no choice in the matter, and I felt like he knew that deep down, but he still hated it—which was totally valid. Sometimes, I hated leaving. Actually, since Haley’s death, I always hated leaving Jack. If I didn’t love working at the BAU as much as I did, and if I wasn’t so sure that I would be miserable without my job, then I would have quit just to stay home with Jack. But I wouldn’t have liked being a house mom. To be fair, I don’t think Jack would have liked having me hover around all the time, though, either. I think he wanted us around more, but he still liked some of the freedom that came with having us out of the house. Someday, he was going to be grateful we were gone so often. Before we would know it, he was going to be in high school, and he was going to be pushing us out of the house so that he could host or attend parties. Until then, he just wanted us there. He just wanted his parents—and since he couldn’t have his mom, he wanted me there. Sometimes timing and fate just fucking sucked.

I zipped up our bags and lifted them off the bed. Sighing heavily, I carried them out of the bedroom, and down the hall to Jack’s room. I heard Hotch talking to him quietly. As I turned the corner, I saw Jack lying on his bed, cheek pressed against the pillow, his face smushed and pouting. Hotch had a hand rubbing soft, slow circles on Jack’s back, while the other one supported his crouched position by holding onto his knee. When they heard me enter, Jack looked up at me, but Hotch didn’t.

“We promise, buddy, we’ll try to be home on time for trick-or-treating,” Hotch said. Jack didn’t look convinced, though. “Come on, bud… Can we get a smile?”

“You never miss Halloween.”

“I missed Halloween a few years ago.”

“Yeah, so Mom took me trick-or-treating.”

Hotch and I froze. This wasn’t Jack’s first Halloween without his mom, but it was the first Halloween we were celebrating with her. Since it was about this time last year that we were still mourning her death, none of us were exactly racing to go trick-or-treating. But we had been doing well in the year or so since then. Jack’s therapy was really helping him cope and understand what happened to him and his mom. Hotch was still going to therapy, too. Despite his protests about going and his insistence that he didn’t need it anymore, I still drove him every Tuesday and Thursday to meet with a Bureau therapist that understood the full extent of what happened, and I sat just outside the door the entire time to make sure Hotch wouldn’t try to escape early. We were doing well. Really well.

Still, though, it was in moments like this when Jack would bring up his mom and how she would miss something special to us that we would be caught off guard. He didn’t understand, of course. All he knew was that he mentioned his mom and the two of us would become speechless. He wasn’t old enough to understand yet that we didn’t know how to navigate handling Haley’s death and raising a five year old kid who had countless questions. He wanted to know why on Earth we would potentially be leaving him alone on Halloween night when we promised we would be there. He wanted to know why we weren’t doing more now that his mom was gone. And the worst part was, neither Hotch nor I had an answer for Jack. We just had to try and hold onto our promise that we would be back in time to take him trick-or-treating, and that he wouldn’t be without a parent this time of year. I didn’t care if I would have to leave the case early. If it meant getting back to my little man to make sure he was alright, I was going to do whatever it took.

I sat on the edge of his bed and pushed his hair back. “We’ll be here. I promise. Don’t you trust me?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” I reached out to hug him, and he let me, even going as far to hug me back with a little more force than I was expecting. “I love you, little man.”

“I love you, too.”

I kissed his temple before pulling away to let Hotch hug him. When we had said our goodbyes, and I felt somewhat reassured that Jack was alright with us leaving, we got in the car and started driving to Quantico.

We were headed to Detroit—which was absolute chaos that time of year. The local PD had noticed a three year trend in the days leading up to Halloween where he was only killing for those three days, and then he would disappear. At first, they thought it was nothing. However, last night, they had another case matching the last two years exactly. By then, it was clear to them that they needed a helping hand with this case, hence why we were being called in at the last minute; and hence why we were already on the jet and not meeting in the boardroom. With one night gone, there were only two nights left before the Unsub would disappear. If we didn’t catch him before then, we would have to wait another year. There was no fucking way I was going to let that happen. I wasn’t going to miss this year’s Halloween and next year’s Halloween with my son because of some asshole in Michigan, of all places. This Unsub who was burning his victims alive would have hell to pay if I broke my little man’s heart two years in a row.

Yeah, this guy, in all of his psychotic glory, was going out of his way to burn three victims over the span of three days, then proceeded to dump them all in random places around the city. Unfortunately for him, the first last night got a little out of hand, so before he could hide the body, the fire department was already made aware of the burning abandoned warehouse, and they were on their way. So, the Unsub left the body and ran.

By the time we were landing, Hotch had already dispersed assignments. Hotch, Rossi, Emily, Spencer, and JJ were all headed to the precinct to start the profile since we were in a rush, and in the meantime, Morgan and I were headed to the crime scene to get a look at what happened for ourselves. The local fire department—the ones who called us in—had done their best examining the scene on their own, but they were trained to look for human interference in dangerous fires. We had a vastly different skill set. Knowing that we were dealing with a serial killer gave us the upper hand since we knew what we were dealing with, but the FD just didn’t get that since it wasn’t their job.

As we pulled up to the warehouse where the most recent crime scene had been discovered, it suddenly made sense to us why he had chosen this place. Out of the entire city, this area was extremely neglected. It was quiet, and at night it was probably dark, and the seclusion meant that no one could stop him. That was… unless someone happened to be passing by and saw the fire. Unfortunately for him, someone _did_ pass by and call 9-1-1 for that very reason, ruining his plans—whatever they were. We knew that we would learn more inside.

“Hello,” a man standing in the doorway of the warehouse said to us, waving in our direction as we got out of the car. He approached us. “Al Garner with the Detroit Fire Department.” Morgan shook his hand first while introducing us. I smiled and shook his hand. “I’ll be showing you guys around inside.”

As we started walking, Morgan asked, “Do you guys get a lot of fires this time a year?”

“When I first started working for the DFD, we had about 600 fires during the three days leading up to Devil’s Night. Nowadays, people are more concerned with drinking themselves to death than lighting fires. As of last night, we’re only down to 118.” He pointed to the door, “Our city-wide Neighborhood Watch program has really helped. We’re shorthanded down at the DFD, so volunteers really make or break it.”

I looked at Morgan, sharing a look that said, “Volunteers? People willing to thrust themselves into the investigations. Great.” So, I asked Al, “How many volunteers do you guys have now?”

He was leading us through the halls inside of the warehouse. “A thousand.”

“A thousand people?”

“They’re spread out all over the city. One of the volunteers actually called in this fire last night.”

“We’ll need to talk to them,”

“I’ll arrange for that.”

“And we’ll need the roster for all of your volunteers,” Morgan said.

“Whatever you guys need. But, do you guys really think that he’s one of them?” he asked, turning his head over his shoulder.

I shrugged. “We can’t rule anything out just yet.”

Really, though, the likelihood was ridiculously high. I could remember that the last big arson case we worked on was _years_ ago. It always stuck out to me because Hotch and I had only just started dating, and somehow, the case got personal for him because the Unsub was killing families in their own homes, and our main suspect was a family man—a father who was just trying to do his best… Like Hotch. At the time, I didn’t know how to comfort him with that stuff. I knew that he was struggling to sit in that hospital room with the one victim who had survived the attack, and I knew that he was trying to clear this guy’s name, even though the evidence was stacked against him. In the end, though, Hotch was right. As always.

Our Unsub turned out to be an eco-radical that believed that the best way to create change and to get revenge on people for mistreating the Earth was by setting people on fire. It was a twisted way of thinking. But, then again, most sociopaths didn’t make sense, anyhow. But when our suspect found out who the real Unsub was—that he was a man who had been trying to help the FBI find whoever was really responsible, he went to end it once and for all.

I would never forget watching Gideon and Morgan as they held a distraught Hotch back. He was screaming and pushing, begging that we do something to help the innocent man trapped inside the burning building. But there was nothing we could do. That was the outcome of what happened when two people injected themselves into an investigation that they were emotionally connected to. Hotch had to watch another father die, and it killed him. And this was before Foyet— _long_ before Foyet. There were no concerns that Hotch wouldn’t be able to protect his own family. He had just grown so close to that man during the investigation, connecting about their sons, their wives, and even their abusive fathers.

So, when it came to arson cases like these, I was wary now of “volunteers” that were there to help us with the investigation. I worried even more about Hotch. Now that Haley was gone—which was still a fresh wound thirteen months later—he was vulnerable to his empathy. He was a good man who cared a lot for other people, and he spent his entire life trying to save and protect strangers for that very reason, but he also knew that he couldn’t save everyone. He wanted to. Out of everyone in the world, he wanted to save the one person he should have always been there to protect, but… he failed… I hated admitting that. But he did. We both recognized that he failed to save Haley. However, he was never going to fail again, that much I knew. He was going to do whatever it took to protect me, Jack, and the rest of the world. Over the next two days, if we were to meet anyone with any type of tragic backstory, I knew that Hotch would break. There was just too much overlap between that old arson case and the sting of Haley’s death.

This crime scene, in particular, was in an abandoned engine factory, according to Al. That wasn’t uncommon in Detroit. Half of the city was filled with places just like this that had been ignored by companies once they moved onto bigger and better things, leaving a desolate building for the locals to maintain or pay to have demolished, which they obviously didn’t have the money for. But that was what attracted people like our Unsubs to them. With no one around, they were the perfect grounds for crimes and squatting. Druggies, homeless people, criminals, and high school kids all sought out freedom in building like these. But that just made our jobs that much harder.

The victim had been tied to a pole on top of a pyre in the middle of the room. Leading from the door to the pyre were drag tracks, a mixture of blood, dirt, gasoline, and soot. The only concern I had about that was that it was clear that the Unsub had dragged the victim in through the door we entered in, too, but the oil and soot told us that he also stood there while watching the victim burn. That was what didn’t make sense. In that massive warehouse, there were hundreds of better places to stand and watch it if he were a Sadist.

“How fast did it take for responders to get onto the scene?” I asked the Fire Department Chief.

“Less than five minutes.”

“So, for three years in a row, this guy has been able to uphold a pattern, despite the DFD and the local Neighborhood Watch program lurking around, keeping an eye out for guys just like him. How does he get away with that?”

Morgan shrugged. “Well, if he’s one of them, it’s easy to ensure no one comes in his area.”

“Yeah… But, then, how did he not know that there was a witness around? And why doesn’t it say that anyone else on the roster should have been in this area?”

“Because he’s not one of them.”

I nodded. “Exactly. There has to be another way that he can keep track of the fire department’s response times.”

Morgan stayed silent as he considered and continued circling the pyre. When a thought struck him, he looked over at me. “A police radio scanner.” He stopped. “They all share the same form of communication so that the police, firefighters, and paramedics can arrive on scene as fast as possible. If he hears on the scanner that the fire has already been called in, he stops watching, turns, and leaves as fast as he can. He’s gone before the firefighters are in the firetruck.”

“And as long as he stays in his safety zone, Rivertown,” I said, referencing where we were standing and where all of the other bodies had been found, “he knows how fast he needs to be.”

“This is worse than we thought…”

I nodded an agreement.

* * *

While we were gone, Reid and Hotch had been reviewing victimology, trying to find something that could connect all seven victims so far in the hopes of leading us straight to the Unsub. However, they were nose down in papers when we walked in. Even as Morgan and I sat down across from them, waiting to be caught up to date, Hotch and Reid kept reading and talking amongst themselves. And then Reid perked up with eureka.

“I couldn’t find any overlap, per say,” he began explaining to the four of us, “but I think I might have something interesting here.” He opened a file up to an 180 degree angle, then set it down in the middle of the boardroom table so that we could all see. “Tommy Proctor, our first victim, was a convicted felon. He was buried, unlike the other victims, which meant that our Unsub likely knew him.”

“Or, he could have just felt remorse since it was his first kill,” I countered.

That was how Reid and I always were. We pushed back on each other’s ideas and wisdom because it kept us on our toes, and it was really the only kinds of interactions we had at all. Since Haley’s death, we hadn’t been as witty with each other. I think he was scared to push back against me, especially since the team had been turning to me more while Hotch was still out of the office and there needed to be a smooth transition of power. I think he was also scared of breaking me. When Tobias Hankle took him, I remember the worry that was knotting in the pit of my stomach because we couldn’t afford to lose our boy genius… and, in some odd way, I could tell that Reid felt the same way about me and Hotch during the Foyet chaos. But now we were getting back into a rhythm. By pushing back against him, it was my way of telling him that I liked how we used to interact, and that he could give me shit for not knowing what I was talking about sometimes, or if I missed something obvious—since noticing small things quickly was supposed to be _my_ thing.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Reid argued directly at me. “The autopsy report shows that there were multiple botched attempts to burn Proctor, which means that—”

“The Unsub didn’t know how difficult it is to burn a body.”

Reid grinned slightly at our scrimmage. “Precisely.”

The door suddenly opened, Rossi entering as fast as he could, his suit jacket flying behind him like a cape. Emily was following just behind him. She closed the door as Rossi continued pacing while thinking over-time. “So, I just finished talking to the wife of last night’s victim. During her comprehensive, she recalls seeing the Unsub. He’s a tall, black, mid-twenty year old guy with a burn on his face.

“Well, that gives us a stressor,” I said, relaxing back in my seat.

“And the M.O. makes a lot more sense now,” Reid said.

Hotch agreed. “Yeah, but our Unsub probably wasn’t burned at a stake. There are hundreds of burn victims a year—”

“Thousands, actually.”

“Thousands,” Hotch corrected himself with a scoff. “The information helps, but it doesn’t give us a name. How are we supposed to narrow it down?”

“What if Reid and I were wrong?” I asked. I waited for someone else to say something—especially Reid—but everyone just stared at me blankly; so, I continued, “What if he did know how hard it is to burn a body, but the botched burns were actually his way of torturing Tommy Proctor, and then he actually did bury him because it was personal.”

Taking all of our different theories, we all split up to separate sides of the boardroom to start brainstorming. There was a piece here that we were missing. I wasn’t sure what it was, and Emily didn’t seem to understand either while she was working with me. We were trying to make the remorse theory work. Even though all of the other scenes didn’t show any sign of remorse at face value, I knew I could eventually see it if I just went through every single piece of evidence. Again, I had to prove to myself and the team that I wasn’t completely worthless. When my mind was too busy with other things, it was impossible for me to pull through with my “thing” as the one person who could just look at things and then immediately recognize them and profile them, and I knew that it was damn near impossible because every time I saw the word “Halloween”, I thought about how Jack was sitting at home, waiting and hoping that we would be back on time to take him trick-or-treating.

And then it suddenly hit me.

I stood quickly, rushing to gather up all of the files in front of me and order them so that I could see a similarity that I was catching onto. Reid said that he didn’t see any connections, but there was something he always overlooked. Relationships. He sucked at recognizing how important relationships were to people—whether they were romantic, familial, or platonic. That was his one blind spot because he never had a connection like that before with anyone who mattered, except for his mother. I mean, he had used people as surrogates, but they all left him, so he had since failed to see how people could hold their connection to someone over all else when he had always been put second to other things or other people. But not me and Hotch. He and I were everything to each other, and Jack was our everything. Period. We held those connections more dearly than anything else. It was possible that the Unsub felt the same way.

Everyone stopped what they were working on in order to watch me closely. When I found what I was looking for, though, I took a step back, letting it settle in my mind before I decided to tell them. Each of the victims had been taken in front of a loved one. A partner, a child, even a sibling. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. It was easier to take someone when they were isolated to ensure that there were no witnesses, and that no one could stop you. But this Unsub specifically chose people who were with someone who meant everything to them. This was all a part of his M.O. His ritual included taking someone from their loved one.

“He was burned in front of someone he loved…” I mumbled. Hotch cocked a brow at me. “He’s taking his victims in front of people,” I explained turning the files so that the team could see the connection I made. Reid furrowed his brows in confusion. I could tell that he didn’t understand how it was that he overlooked something as simple as that. I shook off a smirk. “He—”

Hotch’s phone started ringing. As he answered, his face immediately fell. The call was quick, barely even giving him a chance to thank the person reaching out to him. “There’s been another abduction,” Hotch told us.

“How do we know that it’s our guy?” Rossi inquired.

“Because his daughter told the responding officers that a monster took her dad.”

So, I was right… I wish I hadn’t hit the nail on the head so perfectly like that—or at least I wished I would have seen it sooner, because maybe that girl would still be with her father instead of asking why this happened to him.

“Garcia’s sending the police report to us now,” Hotch continued, our phones buzzing just on time. We all looked down to review what the girl had told the officers.

Christopher Edwards, thirty-five, white, single father, lived in the suburbs. Seemingly normal life. Actually, his life, on paper, appeared to be perfect, except for the fact that his wife left him and his daughter three years ago, shortly after she gave birth. Since then, he had to up his game in order to support his family, so he became a local contractor in Rivertown… our Unsub’s safe hunting grounds. He was burning all of the bodies in that area, which meant that area was extremely important to him—in fact, it could have been where he was burned in the first place. All of this could be revenge for what happened to him.

“Garcia,” I said after Morgan got her on the phone for all of us, “Christopher Edwards, what subcontractors did he work with?”

She scoffed. “The list is huge. Do you have any more parameters?”

“Anything that requires fire.”

“Cross reference that with anyone who’s part of the volunteer neighborhood watch, baby girl,” Morgan said. I nodded an agreement since it was a good idea. As we had suspected earlier while down at the warehouse, he was probably inserting himself into the investigation by staying on the watch.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, baby girl, there’s gotta be something.”

“Okay, give me a second. Let me switch some things around here, and maybe I’ll find a name buried in here somewhere—Ah! I’m amazing! His name is Kaman Scott.”

“How are you so sure?” Emily asked.

“Because, growing up, Kaman Scott was on track to practically be the bad boy turned convict. His family was poor, his education fell through, and he had been arrested multiple times in his teenage years. Only, in 2004, something happened to make him clean up his act and get his life together. After that change, there’s no sign of bad behavior. Actually, he’s the poster boy for a guy just trying to make it in an unfair world.”

“Maybe that’s when he met someone,” Rossi theorized. “That introduction gave him a reason to become a better person. What normally does that?” he asked rhetorically.

“Love,” Hotch answered, anyhow.

“But how do you go from changing your life in 2004 for someone you love to killing three people every year in 2009?” Morgan asked.

“A breakup.”

“Okay. So, then, where did the burn come from?”

“The breakup was probably a result of the burn. So, we need to look for something that happened in Kaman’s life—”

“Already found it,” Garcia interrupted. “In 2005, Kaman and his first victim, Tommy Proctor, were in a car accident, which resulted in Kaman’s car blowing up.”

“There’s the revenge,” Rossi said.

“How come he was stagnant between 2005 and 2009?” I asked.

Garcia’s keyboard clacked into the microphone of the call for a moment. “According to the accident report, Tommy walked away without a scratch, but Kaman was put into a coma. While he was out of it, he lost his job, his home—Oh! Oh, my! His landlord was Tony Torrell—the most recent victim.”

“Does Kaman have any family or friends that we could talk to?”

“No… But I just sent you guys his address.”

Hotch looked between me and Morgan. “You guys go check it out.” We nodded and started making our way out. Hotch grabbed my wrist before I could walk past him. “Be careful.”

I smiled and nodded, though I wanted to lean down to kiss him more than anything in the world. “I will.” I would just have to kiss him later.

That was all I could think on our drive to Kaman Scott’s house, though. That one kiss. Getting home to Jack and getting time alone with Hotch was all I needed in life nowadays. Holding onto that hope, knowing that they loved me, and I loved them, and holding my breath until I was at home with them again was what pushed me through every case. I suddenly understood what it was that my parents were always racing home for. My mom traveled the world for the CIA, working on all of these covert operations that we could never have _any_ information about, which made growing up hard; but when she would come, she would set everything to the side just to be with my dad, me, and Elle. My dad wasn’t gone as often. Since he worked at the Academy, there were times when he was called away to do certain things, but he was usually more hands on with me and Elle. In a way, I supposed Hotch was like my mother, and Haley was like my dad. Only, now, Jack didn’t have someone who was with him all of the time—or at least the majority of the time. Yeah, Jessica was a rockstar for offering to help around with Jack whenever we were out of town, but… Jack needed someone there with him… But it couldn’t be me or Hotch. As bad as it sounded, we couldn’t live without our jobs.

When Morgan and I arrived at Kaman’s apartment, we didn’t even bother putting on vests. Since the report had come in that another person had gone missing, we knew that he would be all the way in Rivertown, completing his ritual while the team was searching for him there and Morgan and I were putting the pieces together at the apartment as much as we could. But the door was locked. On the drive over, Hotch had gotten a judge to sign a warrant, which meant that we could go in without an invitation. So, Morgan took a step back, then kicked the door in.

As we hurried inside, I tried to flip on a light switch since it was so dark, but the lights just wouldn’t turn on. I huffed. No light, no mirrors, no windows… It was going to be impossible to navigate our way around. The best we could do was to grab our flashlights and start using them to find clues as to who Kaman Scott was, where he was, and who his next victim was going to be. If we couldn’t stop this murder, we could at least stop the next one.

“Look at this,” Morgan finally said. I made my way around the room to meet up with him in a corner where he saw a collection of gas cans cluttered together. And they were all full. “He’s prepared.”

I shook my head at how ridiculous this was. There was no way for him to see out into the world—or more specifically, no way for the world to see him. There was nothing personal in his apartment. No pictures, décor, even DVDS. There was nothing in there that told us who Kaman Scott was as a person, and not just an Unsub. He was human at one point, right? He had lived a life with someone that made him happy, and yet there wasn’t a single hint of her anywhere. Even if they broke up as a result of his car crash, his obsession should have still been obvious. It was curious that he was hiding it so well.

And then, as if it were a miracle or Morgan could read my mind, he said, “Greenaway.” I turned to him again to see that he had just flipped Kaman’s mattress to find a diary hidden underneath. “There’s his obsession.” He pointed to the scrapbook of pages that were dedicated to whichever girl it was that Kaman had clearly been dating before his accident. “There’s no name in her.”

“He was covering his tracks.”

“We profiled him as organized, but this is a little much, don’t you think?”

“Not really. If he really wanted to keep her all to himself, he might go to extra lengths to make sure no one can find her.”

“Yeah, well, I know someone who can,” he teased, digging for his phone in his back pocket.

I smirked at how he was off to go call his “baby girl” to help us find whoever it was that Kaman was so obsessed with. Using facial recognition, she would be able to deduce it within minutes—maybe even seconds. She was good like that. Since her attack nearly two years ago, we had all been trying to appreciate her more since what she did was incredibly important to our work, and without her, we would be struggling to close cases as effortlessly as we were.

“We have a problem,” Morgan said, catching my attention. “Hotch and Chief Garner just found the most recent victim’s body dumped in Rivertown.”

“So, he’s on his endgame.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Garcia said over the phone, “I can’t find her. She’s not showing up in my database.”

“How’s that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“And we really don’t have time to figure out why,” Hotch said on the call, too. “Garcia, is there anything recognizable in the photos to help give us a lead? Maybe a home address, school address, work—”

“Jay-Mo’s diner.”

“What?” I questioned.

“Jay-Mo’s diner,” she repeated. “It’s in the background of all of the photos.”

Hotch asked Chief Garner if he had ever heard of Jay-Mo’s, to which the fireman agreed. “We’ll head there now,” Hotch said.

“And we’ll meet you there so that we can regroup,” Morgan offered. It was a good idea, and it was a plan that seemed sufficient enough to Hotch so that he could hang up on us.

As we were pulling up to the diner, I could see a hint of red and orange hues that came from a roaring blaze inside. The closer we got, the more I could see it growing. The windows suddenly burst open. Just as Morgan put the car in park, I saw Hotch’s SUV parked on the curb just ahead, the driver’s side door completely open. My heart sped up. The realization dawned on me the moment I saw two shadows of men moving about inside the diner.

“No—” I struggled to get my seatbelt off. My wrist was still stuck against the buckle when I opened the door and started stumbling out of the car in an attempt to get to the diner and run inside to help Hotch. “Fuck. Come on.” I pulled against the seatbelt until it released me. “Hotch!” I shrieked, jumping forward to run to him. Morgan caught me in his arms, though, and held me back. “Hotch!” I clawed at Morgan’s grip. “Aaron!” The door to the diner opened up, and I saw Hotch stumbling out while carrying someone along. “Aaron!” I kicked Morgan’s ankle to get him to release me, but all he did was groan and constrict his arms around my waist until I couldn’t move. And then the diner blew up. “No!” I cried as Hotch and the man he was helping along flew forward onto their stomachs.

In his state of shock, Morgan released me. The second my feet were back on the ground, I started racing towards the sidewalk outside of the burning building, where Hotch and the man were groaning and writhing in pain. As I fell to my feet, Hotch looked up at me. I put my hands on his face. He was blinking dramatically, and looking around blindly, just like he did in New York. I told him to stay still. Morgan came running up to check on the man Hotch pulled out of the diner. While he called out for the paramedics, I kept my hold on Hotch’s face, trying to calm him down.

“I’m fine…” he groaned.

“Your ears—”

“They’re not ringing.”

“Your back—”

“I’m fine, Y/N. I swear. I’m not lying.”

I pressed my palms to his cheeks a little harder to keep him steady as I searched his eyes and body language for any of his tells. He was telling the truth. “Don’t ever do that again, Aaron Hotchner. I mean it. Don’t ever scare me like that again, so help me—”

He sat up and kissed me. “I’m okay.”

“Please stop doing this to me,” I whispered calmly. “Please.”

He groaned as he started pushing himself to his feet so that we could move out of the way for the paramedics that were trying to attend to the man Hotch pulled out. We glanced over to see Morgan holding a gash on his leg together until an EMT stepped in to trade places with him, so Morgan stumbled over to stand with us, too.

I was still holding onto Hotch. Ensuring that he was really okay, and not just lying to me about his health, like he had a tendency to do, was my top priority. There were medics helping the man he dragged out. Morgan wasn’t hurt. I was okay. Now, all I needed to be sure of was Hotch. He was an asshole when it came to his own health and safety. He always did everything in his power to protect those around him, and to make sure that they were alright; but he never let anyone show him the same courtesy. That was, unless I was babying him. But I didn’t want to baby him. I wanted to trust that for once—since Haley, at least—he could see that I needed to know immediately when something was wrong, and I needed to know the full extent of whatever was wrong with him whenever something bad happened. I just couldn’t afford to lose him like he lost Haley. I couldn’t fucking do it. In fact, I couldn’t even _think_ about it. I didn’t want to imagine what could have happened if he had wasted another few seconds while saving that man in that diner. As noble as it was, it was ridiculously foolish. What was I supposed to do if he died? Raise Jack on my own? How? How was I supposed to do that without him? How was Jack supposed to grow up without a mom and a dad? Fuck Hotch for not thinking that through. Fuck him—

And then I flung my arms around his neck.

“I mean it, Aaron…” I mumbled into his neck.

As he wrapped his arms around my waist and hid his face in the crook of my neck, too, he whispered, “I couldn’t let him die in there.”

“And I couldn’t let you die in there, either.” I kissed his cheek. “We promised we would be home on time to take him trick-or-treating… Don’t make me a liar.”

Hotch turned to kiss my lips. “I’m sorry, baby.”

It was a little overdramatic to be all over each other and talking like that, but seeing him risk his life like that could only remind me of Haley. Every single danger that was thrown in our path just reminded me of her. It was like flashes. Victims, Unsubs, Hotch at work, even Jack getting pushed around at soccer… I couldn’t shake it. It was like a bad taste in my mouth. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get over it. I thought I was doing better. In fact, I _knew_ I was getting better. It had been thirteen months since I found her on our carpet like that. Thirteen months should have been long enough. Yet, it wasn’t. The only comfort I had was holding him in my arms— _alive_. It wasn’t like watching him hold Haley’s dead body in his arms. He was alive. He was okay.

“Hotch!” Morgan called, running over to the man on the ground. “He’s saying something.”

We parted from our hug so that Hotch could fall to his knees beside the victim and hold his hand as he tried to croak something into Hotch’s ear. “Tra—” he tried to say. “T—” He was just too weak from the throw of the explosion. “Trac… Tracy…”

“Tracy?” Morgan clarified.

“Yes…”

“Who’s Tracy?” Hotch asked.

“Tracy…”

“Who is that?”

“Tracy…”

“Sir, you have to move again,” one of the paramedics insisted.

So, we had gone to the diner with the lead that Kaman’s girlfriend used to go there all the time. It was a far-fetched lead, and we weren’t at all sure if it would pan out, but we had to try, and it was a good thing we did because we managed to save a man’s life in the process. But the girlfriend… The owner had given us a name: Tracy. We knew that the Unsub wasn’t a woman, so the owner of the diner must have known what we were there and who it was we wanted to know about. Kaman’s girlfriend’s name was Tracy. That was the logical explanation. The only question now was… Tracy who? And how were we supposed to find her?

I grabbed my phone and dialed Garcia’s number. “Garcia—”

“Is Hotch okay? He told me he was heading to the diner, and he told me he was heading in while we were on the phone, but all I heard was an explosion before it cut out—”

“He’s fine, Garcia. I promise.”

I heard her sigh with relief. “Thank Heavens.”

“I need you to look at the family that owns this diner. Is the owner of Jay-Mo’s related to a Tracy?”

“Lemme look…” she mumbled while typing. “Oh—Yeah. Tracy Anderson. She lives in Ohio—”

“No, she would be nearby. Where do her parents live?”

“Indian Village. It’s five miles from where you are.”

I hadn’t even realized that Hotch was listening to the call because I had put it on speaker in order to fidget with texting Emily everything I was learning. Before I could do or say anything, Hotch was getting in his black SUV again, this time dragging the DFD Chief with him.

“God fucking dammit,” I cursed under my breath. The chief probably knew the best way to get there and probably where the Andersons lived if the diner really was all that, as he said it was. That gave Hotch the upper hand. “Garcia, we need the address. The whole team does.”

“Already sent.”

My phone buzzed just as she said it. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Be safe.”

Morgan and I hurried back to our car, racing to catch up to Hotch as dispatch put out the address to the rest of the police and fire forces. Since the drive was short and practically past the sheriff’s department, we were leading a line of speeding vehicles with lights and sirens. We had the whole cavalry. It was going to be okay.

And then the son of a bitch had to say the one thing I absolutely didn’t want to hear just then. “Everyone needs to stand down,” Hotch whispered into his comm. I cocked a brow. What the fuck was he talking about? Stand down? Why? “I just need one guy from SWAT, that’s all.”

Morgan started coming to a slow and steady stop, reaching to turn off the lights and sirens, just like all of the other cars around us were doing. I sat up straight. What the fuck was he doing? No! This wasn’t right. We had to go help Hotch because he promised me that he wouldn’t keep doing this to me. I told him that he couldn’t keep putting himself in harm’s way just for a case when our little man was waiting at home for him—when our family just couldn’t afford to lose anyone else. Ever.

“Morgan,” I said urgently, “go.”

“No.” He turned off the car.

I turned to open the car door, but he locked it and put the child locks on. My face fell. “Derek Morgan, let me out—”

“Hotch gave us orders.”

My heart started pounding in my chest. I glanced out the side window, pressing my forehead against the cold window, watching as it started to rain. I’d never felt trapped like this before. This wasn’t even that dramatic compared to that day when Foyet took Haley from us; yet I found that my heart was so heavy with worry that night. At least someone had been trying to help the day Haley died. We were all in a car together, racing there as fast as we could, trying to beat Foyet before he could kill Jack and Hotch, too. The worry I had about not knowing if Hotch was okay or not was the same exact worry I had coursing through my veins when I thought that phone call was the last time I would ever get to tell him that I loved him, and that I would end up finding all three of them dead in our house.

“Y/N, this is just another day on the job. Remember what that was like?” Morgan asked me quietly. “The two of you always used to run into stupid shit like this because that’s part of the job, and that’s part of the dumb fucking thoughts you two always have running in your heads that it’s better if one of you go down than someone else on the team. So, now, you get to sit here and listen to his orders and worry about him the same way we always had to listen and worry about you guys.”

“I hate you.”

“Get in line,” he teased.

To be fair, when I did “stupid shit like this”, I wasn’t responsible for a son. I mean… I _was_ , but… It was different because Jack had Hotch and Haley if something ever happened to me. But now it was just me and Hotch. And, in some weird way, I was still okay with Jack losing me over Hotch, because at least he would still have his dad—his own flesh and blood. If it were me in Hotch’s shoes in that moment, telling the team to stay back, I would’ve been comforted by the fact that Jack wouldn’t be alone still. But if Hotch died… That felt different. After everything, neither Jack nor I would know how to live like that.

“Sunshine, we’re going to be okay. He’s going to be okay.”

“We shouldn’t have let him become the unit chief again so soon—”

“It’s been over a year,” Morgan tried to explain to me.

I scoffed. “I know how long it’s been… I think about it every day…”

Morgan stayed quiet. Neither of us knew what to say now. I had practically snapped at him, though I hadn’t meant it, and I was sure he was aware of that. It still hurt, though. It hurt me, too. But I was so drained by my worry and running around, chasing after Hotch every time he went off to do “stupid shit like this”. We couldn’t afford to do this anymore. I knew that neither of us were going to quit the FBI because that just wasn’t like us, and we were always unhappy when we weren’t in the field; but I was getting tired of this. Things _had_ to have a happy upturn sooner than later. Something good needed to happen soon. If we were cursed to always be upset like this, it was going to be the death of me.

“We’re clear in here,” Hotch said over the comm.

Within an instant, Morgan turned the car back on and started driving, meanwhile I worked to get the lights and sirens back on. The parade of black SUVs and police squad cars followed suit, taking our lead as we continued around the corner and towards the house. The DFD Chief was standing on the driveway, waving us over. As we pulled up onto the curb, I unlocked the car and jumped out, grabbing ahold of my gun, which was holstered on my hip, and my handcuffs, which were clipped onto my back—a trick Elle taught Morgan, which he then taught me.

Inside, Hotch was helping to free an old man and woman who were tied to the dining room table. Kaman, our Unsub, was on his knees, hugging a little boy as his mother stood close by. I slowed and furrowed my brows. Why hadn’t Hotch arrested Kaman yet? Why was he— Oh. I realized quickly what the situation was, so I released my hold on my gun and my handcuffs so that I could bar anyone else from entering until Hotch gave the go ahead, because there was no way I was going to arrest a father in front of his own son. I couldn’t imagine how that would feel. If someone arrested Hotch in front of Jack, I would have been furious, but upset because I would never in a million years want Jack to have to witness something like that. So, we were going to wait until the opportune moment.

Just as Hotch finished freeing the man and woman, he pushed himself to his feet and backed up towards me. “Go ahead,” he whispered to me.

I nodded, understanding that he wouldn’t want to make the arrest at all. So, I carefully approached Kaman and his family, leaning in to whisper into Tracy’s ear that it would be best if he took her son outside for a minute. She nodded. Kaman was pried away from his son, reaching out uselessly for another touch or interaction that wouldn’t come. When his son was gone, his mother having carried him out in her arms, I grabbed my handcuffs again, this time flashing them in front of Kaman so he knew what was happening; then, as I cuffed him, I recited the Miranda Rights for him, all while he was silent. I brought him to his feet when he was secured. An officer was then sent in to retrieve Kaman and take him outside.

Telling by the look on Hotch’s face, I knew that he didn’t want to spend another second in that house, but he wasn’t going to leave as long as I was in there either. So, I started walking out. As I strode past him, I made a gesture with my head for him to follow me outside without saying anything. He did.

When we were on the driveway with the rest of the team and the platoon of police that had come with us, I crossed my arms and watched as Kaman was led through the crowd. Morgan was standing by the car, watching us, a small smirk on his face that said: “I told you it would be okay. It’s always okay.” And I damn near wanted to smack that smirk away.

“You okay?” I asked Hotch worriedly.

He nodded. “Yeah. I just…” He turned over his shoulder to see the officers putting Kaman in the squad car. “Him and his son… They reminded me…” He sighed when Kaman’s son pressed his hands against the window of the squad car so that he could see his dad again.

“They reminded you of Jack?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Baby,” I cooed, grabbing his hand. I kissed his knuckles gently like he would always do with me when he was bored or wanted to comfort me. “Let’s go home.”

* * *

As I opened the door, Hotch pinched my hip, making me yelp playfully before kissing him. We both froze when we saw Jessica standing there, her arms crossed over her chest, a slight smile hiding by her faux anger. I bit my lip and laughed. It felt like I had just been caught bringing a boy home by my mother. The way she was staring at us disapprovingly, tapping her foot against the wood floor, but still somewhat happy to see me, and to see me happy. Actually, if anything, it felt like being caught by Elle.

“You guys are back early,” Jessica noted with a slight uptick in her voice, signaling that she was ecstatic about our sudden appearance. Her and Jack must have been way too skeptical about us coming back on time. “He’s doing homework upstairs.”

“On Halloween?” I questioned.

“He didn’t think you guys were coming, and he said he didn’t want to go trick-or-treating with me.”

And then we heard the pattering of little feet overhead. Jack must have seen our car pulling into the driveway because he was running as fast as he could down the hallway upstairs, racing for the steps, at which point, we heard him jumping down the steps. He knew he wasn’t supposed to run in the house. It was a bad habit, and we didn’t need him putting holes in the walls because he would crash into something or someone. But I would let it slide this one time. I could overlook him running in the house simply for the sake of getting to see him sooner.

I gasped playfully, “Look who it is!” Jack kept running at me, his arms quickly widening out so that I could brace my hands under his shoulders and lift him up into my arms. I hugged him close to my chest and kissed his cheeks over and over again. “It’s my little man!” I smacked one last kiss on his cheek. “Are you ready to trick-or-treat?” Jack nodded. I squeezed him tight. “Go get into your costume, then, okay?”

Jack slid out of my arms. After taking Jessica’s hand, the two of them ran upstairs together to help him get into his costume. Our theme this year was superheroes. Jack was on a kick with Spider-Man instead of Superman these days, so his dream since we started talking about what he was going to dress up as was to be Spider-Man. When he decided on superheroes, Hotch and I had to start figuring out what we were going to do. Hotch got lazy by digging into his closet to find an old t-shirt he had with Superman’s logo on it. He decided that he was going to pair that with a pair of jeans and call it a day. Meanwhile, I was dressing up as Wonder Woman—which I took deadly seriously by going out to find a real, good quality costume that fit me. It had a tight red top, low cut gold collar, short blue skirt, red shin and wrist guards, gold headband, and— my favorite part—the gold whip that attached to my skirt.

As I stepped out of the bathroom, adjusting my skirt to make sure it was lying flat, I could hear Hotch shuffling around the room to finish getting ready himself. “How do I look?” I asked.

Hotch turned to me, and I started spinning in a slow circle so that he could get a good look at me. His arms unfolded from in front of his chest, his mouth fell agape, and his eyes brightened. “You look…” he bit his lip, “ _so_ hot.” I laughed and shook my head at him. “Fuck,” he growled under his breath, stepping closer to me. His hands grabbed my hips and yanked me towards him before he kissed me roughly. “I love you,” he mumbled against my lips.

“I love you, too,” I responded, putting my hands on his shoulders, and sliding them up slowly to hold his face. “The Superman look is good for you.” I giggled as we parted.

“Do we have to go out or can we just lock the door and use this whip?” he asked me, yanking on the gold rope rolled up on my hip.

I rolled my eyes at him and pried his hands away. “It’s part of my costume, don’t touch.”

Hotch squinted and pulled me back towards him again. “It would look so good around your wrists, though…” He leaned in to kiss me.

“Okay, Dad, I’m ready,” Jack said, running down the hall. Hotch and I turned to face the door, but his hands didn’t leave my hips quite yet. I tilted my head to the side and rested it on Hotch’s shoulder. Jack stepped into our bedroom, dressed in a small, tailored suit, sleek black dress shoes, and one of Hotch’s ties hanging loosely around his neck. Jessica came in, too, staying just a few steps behind Jack. “Do you like it?”

Hotch raised a brow. “What happened to Spider-Man, kiddo? I thought we were all supposed to be superheroes.”

“Spider-Man isn’t a superhero.”

“He’s not?”

Jack shook his head. “No.”

“Okay,” Hotch played along, “I give up. Who are you supposed to be?”

Jessica was grinning from the doorway, and a smile was creeping onto my face as I realized just how oblivious Hotch was to his son’s love. Jack loved Hotch more than anything in the world. I had been saying it since I first met them; Jack saw Hotch as a superhero akin to the likes of Batman and Superman. I mean, he literally called us superheroes, and he said that our job was saving the world, and he called his homework junior superhero work. I couldn’t believe Hotch didn’t put the pieces together as Jack stood there, and both Jessica and I were grinning ear to ear. I couldn’t even believe that Jessica helped him pull this off and they didn’t tell us.

My heart was literally melting in my chest as Jack smiled up at his dad and said, “I’m you, Daddy.”

I looked up at Hotch and saw how big his smile was now. If Jessica and I were grinning ear to ear, I didn’t know what to call Hotch’s smile. I had never seen him that happy in his life. Since Haley, I feared that Hotch sometimes wondered if Jack blamed him somehow; and I was scared that it would impact their relationship because Hotch was worried that he was failing Jack. But seeing Jack standing there, looking like a spitting image of his father, there was no doubt in my mind that Jack loved his father unconditionally and put no blame on him. I just hoped that Hotch understood it now, too, and wouldn’t be afraid anymore. Jack needed his superhero to keep saving the world and raising him the best way he knew how. Hotch had never failed Jack, not even when it came down to what happened with Haley and Foyet. Hotch could never fail Jack. There was no way Hotch’s mind or heart would ever allow that to happen. And I sure as hell wouldn’t let it happen, anyhow.

Hotch didn’t move for a second, paralyzed by the overwhelming feeling of glee. I reached down and peeled his hands from my hips and crouched down. “Come here, little man, let’s fix your tie.” Jack ran over to me and lifted his chin up towards the ceiling so that I could pop the collar of his tiny suit and fix the tie around his neck. “There you go,” I told him as I fixed the collar back down around the tie and Jack lowered his chin again. He lifted his arms into the air, a silent plea for me to pick him up. He was getting so big, I wasn’t sure how much longer Hotch and I could pick him up, but I was going to fight like hell to make that time last, and I was going to take every chance I got. I lifted him into my arms and propped him on my hip. “Do you like Dad’s costume?” I asked Jack, pointing to Hotch’s Superman shirt. Jack nodded. “Doesn’t he look like Superman?” Jack nodded again.

Hotch put his arms out this time, another silent plea to hold Jack. I handed him over and watched as Hotch adjusted Jack’s tie ever so slightly. “You look like a real FBI agent,” Hotch complimented. “How much candy do you think an agent can get tonight?”

“All of the candy!” Jack laughed.

“All of it?! Woah! That agent must be _really_ good to get _all_ of the candy. Do you think you’re up for it?”

“Yeah!” Jack wriggled himself out of Hotch’s hold and jumped to his feet. Jack started shuffling off to grab his Halloween candy bucket downstairs, then anxiously wait by the door until we would catch up with him. Jessica laughed and joined him.

Hotch turned back to me and grabbed my hips roughly again. “I love you.”

My heart swelled. I smiled at him as I brushed my fingers through his hair. “I think I might love him just a little more than you.”

“You always say that.”

“Yeah, but that was adorable…” I giggled and kissed his cheek. “What am I going to do with two Agent Hotchners running around?”

“It could be three,” he teased, leaning in to kiss my lips. I dodged. “Kiss me.” I smirked and dodged again. He grabbed my chin. “Don’t be a brat,” he growled before kissing me deeply. “I love you,” he breathed against my lips.

“I love you, too.” I kissed him back. When I pulled away again, I said, “And it could be more than three at some point—”

“You’re going to kill me…” he whispered with a smirk. His fingers danced over the whip on my side. “One step at a time, though. I just want to make the trio official first.”

“Dad!” Jack called from downstairs.

I giggled again and pulled myself out of Hotch’s hold. “I love you, but we should go.” I grabbed his hand, then started leading him down towards the front door so that we could take our little man trick-or-treating.


	38. GOOD MORNING SURPRISES

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Impregnation kink. Soft sex. Emotional sex. The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying “good girl”.
> 
> TIMELINE: A week after part thirty-seven.

The house went quiet as I turned off the kitchen sink after putting all of the dishes in the dishwasher and started it up for the night. Hotch and Jack went upstairs shortly after we finished our movie, with Jack already half asleep. I told Hotch that he should tuck him in while I finished up the dishes before heading upstairs. It only took me a few minutes, and it was a relief to just get a moment after the movie to have to myself.

After drying my hands on the hand towel on the bar just under the sink, I made sure to turn off the light in the kitchen, then sighed as I turned off the lamp in the living room. When everything was closed up for the night, I headed for the stairs and slowly pulled myself up, trying to ignore the yawn that was building in my chest. I was absolutely exhausted after our long night. Between getting home somewhat late from work with Hotch, then making dinner with him and Jack, and watching a movie afterwards, I was wiped. Hotch seemed tired, too, but not to the same extent. But still.

When I finally reached the top of the steps, I let out another sigh and wiped the exhaustion from my face. I promised that I would say goodnight to Jack just after I was done, so I made my way to the left. I snuck up to his room, careful to not let the floorboards creak under me just in case Jack had already fallen asleep by some miracle. As I approached the corner, I heard whispering in the bedroom between Hotch and Jack. We were way past the age where Jack needed a bedtime story each night, so what the hell were they doing? I decided to stay just outside the doorframe to listen in. It wasn’t for the means of _eavesdropping_ , per say… It was just for… well… memories? I don’t know. I just had a feeling I should stay hidden.

Hotch was whispering when I first started listening. “I wanna ask you something, bud. There’s something that I’ve been meaning to ask Y/N for a very long time, but I don’t want to ask them before I get your say in it. Do you have a guess as to what I want to talk to you about?”

“Is Y/N going to be my new mom?” Jack asked.

“Kinda. You know that your mom is always going to be your mom, even if she isn’t with us anymore; right?” Hotch waited a moment for Jack’s silent response before continuing. “But I want Y/N to finally join our family. Like, officially. How do you feel about that?” There was more silence as Jack silently answered. “You’d be okay with that?” More silence. “You’re sure?”

Jack started giggling. “I said, yes, Dad!”

I heard Hotch chuckle quietly. “I just want to make sure.”

My heart skipped a beat in my chest. A memory raced by me, something I forgot I had tucked away in the back of my mind. When I first met Haley, she told me that Jack loved me, and I remembered feeling so relieved because I didn’t want either of them to dislike me. Throughout the time that I knew Haley, she was always good to me. I wanted to do right by her. I wanted her son to grow up knowing that I could never replace her, and I certainly had no intention of doing so. Jack was her blood, and she did so well raising him… I owed it to her to make sure that she was remembered, but that Jack also grew up still loved. I wasn’t his blood, but… honestly, I did feel like his mother, in the oddest of ways.

Hotch was finally getting around to asking me the big question, and I was glad that he waited to ask Jack first. Originally, the plan was that he wanted to propose to me after New York, but when Foyet came into the picture, that dream was put on hold. It didn’t feel right to get engaged when our lives were spiraling, and then we didn’t want to offend Haley’s memory by jumping the gun too soon after her death. Besides, we were all still mourning her loss. What sense did it make to get engaged so soon after something like that?

But it had been about five months since then, and… yeah… it was still a bit soon, maybe; but our lives weren’t guaranteed, and I was sure that Haley only wanted the three of us to just be happy. She loved Hotch and Jack, and she made it clear that she was fine with mine and Hotch’s relationship because it made him happy. If she were still with us, Hotch likely would have asked for her thoughts, too, and there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that she would tell Hotch to go for it.

“I love you, kiddo,” Hotch whispered. I could practically hear his smile. “And Mom loves you. Y/N loves you. You know that, right?” More silence for a response. “Alright.” I heard him kiss Jack’s forehead. “Get some sleep, my little superhero. We’ll go for a bike ride tomorrow, how about that?” More silence. “Goodnight, bud.”

I realized that I had been standing around for too long, and that I needed to either run down to our bedroom or make it seem like I had just come upstairs in order to not look conspicuous. So, I decided on making it seem like I had just come upstairs by purposefully stepping on a floorboard known to creak, then knocked on Jack’s open bedroom door.

As I stepped into the room, Hotch was pushing himself to his feet to make it look like he had just finished tucking in Jack, nothing else. I smiled at them both, ignoring how well they kept their secret. Like father, like son. Interesting.

“Why are you still up?” I squinted at Jack. He hid his face under his covers to mask his smile. “Nuh uh, let me see you.” I sat on the side of his bed and fought against him to pull the sheets off his face. “There you are,” I said as I “stole” his nose. “You’ll get it back when I get my goodnight hug.”

In an instant, Jack sat up and threw his arms around me. “I love you,” he whispered to me. I held him tight, letting his face nuzzle in the crook of my neck for a few seconds before he got antsy and needed to part from me. As he laid back down, I gave Jack his nose back, and he smiled happily. “Can we go on a bike ride tomorrow?”

It was concerning how good the two of them were at keeping a secret like this from me, and how they didn’t even need to create a plan ahead of time to do it. But I ignored knowing that I had context of their conversation to tell Jack that I thought going on a bike ride tomorrow was a good idea. I kissed him goodnight again. And then once more just for good measure. He started giggling and tried to hide under the covers again, so I gave up.

“I love you, little man.” I reached over to turn off the light on his desk, triggering his automatic night light plugged into the wall across the room. I kissed his forehead again because he had pushed the covers away from his face.

That was when I felt Hotch snake his arms around my torso and pull me off the bed and away from Jack, the three of us laughing. As I stumbled backwards with Hotch holding me steady, I grabbed ahold of the door, and slowly closed it so that the light from the hallway wouldn’t disturb Jack as he tried to sleep. When it was shut, I sighed. I spun around in Hotch’s arms. He was still holding me, and now that I was facing him, I was able to snake my arms around his chest, too. I held onto his shirt since my arms couldn’t fit all the way around him. He kissed my forehead the same way I kept kissing Jack’s.

“I love you,” I whispered to him. I wasn’t sure when or how he would go about _making me a real part of the family_ , and it didn’t really matter to me anymore. Since Foyet put that ring on Haley’s finger, I hadn’t exactly thought about getting engaged—though I would have loved it. As long as Hotch knew that I loved him endlessly, I was content.

* * *

The sunlight peeking through the curtains coaxed me awake in the morning. It was Saturday, finally, which meant that we didn’t have to go into work unless it was an emergency—and, honestly, even then, I was sure if Hotch could pull me out of bed. After the late night we had, I was fine with just staying in bed all day, even though we promised Jack that we would go on a bike ride. I was fine right where I was. If I could have, I would have stayed glued to the bed with Hotch for the rest of my life, falling asleep in his arms, and waking up peacefully to the chirping birds and rising sun.

I rolled over after letting out a quiet sigh and stretched away my exhaustion. To my surprise, though, I was met with Hotch resting on his side, his eyes already following mine as I got comfortable. I squinted at him as I put a hand on his face. “Were you watching me?”

“I couldn’t help myself,” he admitted as a smile grew on his face.

My thumb caressed his cheek. “I like it when you look at me like that…”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.”

“You are.”

My thumb stopped moving for a second before I pulled my whole hand away and I pushed myself to sit upright. “I need to tell you something.” It was eating me up to keep it a secret that I had heard him and Jack talking last night when I shouldn’t have been listening. I needed to get that off my chest.

“I need to say something, too,” he admitted, sitting up. That took me by surprise. What more could he possibly have to say? I figured I’d want to know before admitting that I had practically spied on him and our son. “I love you.” Well, that was no surprise. Why did he have to tell me that? “I... Well...” He laughed at himself. “I’m not even sure how to say this…”

“What is it?” I egged him on, my hand covering his.

“I love you so much.” He had already said that. What was wrong with him? “I have never been more incandescently happy in my life than I’m with you.” Hotch only ever used big words when he was nervous about something and didn’t want to show it.

Oh, god— This was it. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon, but there we were, and I had been so naïve to what was going on. To think that I almost told him everything before he could get a word out. The time had come so soon, catching me off guard. I thought that with Hotch’s constant need to impress me, he would want to shout it from the rooftops, but this… I stared at him and realized how much I loved him. It hit me like a train just how much I loved him. There were hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, yet there weren’t enough to describe how much I loved Aaron Hotchner. People always say that actions speak louder than words, but even then, there wasn’t enough of myself to give to him to express how desperately I loved him and needed him in my life. It felt like I suddenly knew how to breathe and see when I met him. My life had been so grey and dull, but then he started passing my office just to see me and smile in my direction, and my whole world turned upside down before I even realized it. It wasn’t even until the night when I first met Jack that I realized how fervent my love for Aaron was. Before that, I never thought in a million years that I would ever find someone who would understand me and love me zealously. But then he came along, and everything changed. I suddenly wanted to be loved, I wanted to be a part of his family, and I wanted to spend every second of my life by his side. We had our ups, we had our downs, and he had a tendency to scare the shit out of me due to the amount of danger he put himself in at work; but I loved him regardless of what was happening. There wasn’t a moment since meeting him that I didn’t think to myself that he was my everything. I loved every inch and every side of him. There was no doubt in my mind that he was the one. The _only_ one.

All he had to do was ask, and I’d be his.

“You have always been so good with Jack, and even better with me. There aren’t many people who can go through what we’ve been through and still be together; but you have stuck by my side, nevertheless. I didn’t think that it was possible to love someone so much that it could hurt if you weren’t near them… until I met you… and, suddenly, I _had_ to be with you or I would fall apart. I still fall apart whenever I’m not around you. I didn’t think love like that actually existed until I met you. I’ve been trying for so long to ask you this, but every time I thought the moment was coming, something got in the way…” He didn’t want to list them, but I knew what he meant. 

We had talked in New York about getting married, but everyone told us that it was too soon, and I believed them. But then the bombing happened, and I couldn’t have cared less about what everyone else thought. If he would have asked me then and there if I wanted to marry him, I would have dragged him down to the nearest chapel and done it immediately. But when he didn’t ask and things got rough with him not telling me about his health, I had forgotten all about it, but he didn’t. He told me that he went out and bought an engagement ring for me just after we drove back from Cincinnati. He told me while in the hospital after Foyet attacked him that he was going to propose to me as soon as the opportunity presented itself; but Foyet took the ring, and he put it on Haley’s body before Hotch could get the chance to propose. After that, it didn’t feel right to think about marriage for a while. It felt inconsiderate to Haley and the love Hotch had for her to suddenly get engaged just after her death. So, we waited. We waited months… then, suddenly, out of the blue, he asked Jack what he thought about us getting married, and now Hotch was sitting in bed with me, giving a whole speech about our love, and I knew that it had finally come. The waiting and the dancing around the topic had finally come to an end.

I could practically see the end of the aisle as Hotch looked me right in the eyes, taking my hands in his, and asked, “Will you marry me?”

There was no hesitancy in my answer as I smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. A million times, yes.” It felt so cliché, but… Fuck. It was perfect. “Finally,” I teased.

He let out a sigh of relief and grabbed my waist before pulling me close. He smashed his lips against mine with so much force and passion, I could feel my heart leaping out of my chest. Hotch slowly towered over me by pushing himself to his knees. His hands were on my cheeks, his lips pressed to mine until we couldn’t breathe, his eyes screwed shut. I fisted his hair in my hands as he vigilantly pushed me onto my back.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he mumbled against my lips before we could go too far, trying to pull away from me for a moment. Our hands stayed on each other as he leaned away. “What were you going to tell me?”

“Does it matter?” I asked, still smiling. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever stop smiling.

“Tell me,” he insisted.

I twisted some of his hair around my index finger. “I heard you asking Jack about me last night.” Hotch shook his head and hid his face in the crook of my neck, red with embarrassment. “You’re too cute,” I complimented, trying to lift his head back up so that I could stare into his eyes for forever. I kissed him again. “I love you so much.”

He lifted himself up again, this time pulling one hand away from my face so that he could open the drawer of his bedside table and grab something inside. “I started carrying this one around everywhere because…” He hesitated. “Well.” He didn’t have to say it because I knew what he meant. He sat on his knees between my legs and opened the classic black velvet ring box in his hands to reveal an engagement ring. It was a standard single solitaire shaped diamond on a silver band— nothing too flashy, yet still perfect in every way imaginable. Hotch pulled it out of the case and pinched the band between his fingers. “Come here,” he whispered, grabbing my hand. I watched as he slid the ring onto my finger slowly before kissing my hand. “I love you.”

I grabbed his face between my hands, pulling him back up to me. “I love you.” I smashed my lips against his.

Our hips instinctively met simultaneously, grinding against each other desperately to lead to another way for us to say, “I love you.” Hotch laced his fingers with mine and pinned them down next to my head. I moaned when I felt him hardening against me. I kissed him harder. With the escalation between us making our needs known to each other, the two of us didn’t hesitate. Hotch tried pulling his hands away from me so that he could strip off my clothes, but I only let go of his left hand because I wanted to hold his right hand with my left, the ring snug against my finger as a reminder that I was officially going to be his.

There was no way in hell that we were going to have a long engagement. Though we probably should have, we weren’t going to sit around, double guessing ourselves, or just waiting anxiously to finally call each other husband and wife. We loved each other. I didn’t think anyone doubted that. After the rollercoaster of a year we had, it made sense to finally just be in each other’s arms, claiming one another as ours. We deserved that. There was a time when I told myself that I would do whatever it would take to marry Aaron Hotchner. Whether it was a big, white wedding or a small, shotgun wedding, I was going to marry him. That was still true. Though I knew Hotch would want to have some kind of “big” wedding just to tell the whole world: “This person is finally mine, and I want everyone to know it!”, I also knew that there was no way we could pull off something elaborate in such a short time. And in such a short time, I meant a little more than a month.

Yeah. The thought hit me when Hotch used his mouth to pull down my pajama shorts. His teeth grabbed ahold of the waistband, and he slowly started sliding down, utilizing my help that I was offering by bucking my hips upward somewhat. Our three year anniversary was in exactly forty-one days. Three years of calling him mine was quickly approaching, and I wanted that day to be the first time I would call him my husband, too. So, it was either forty-one days from now or 406 days. There was no fucking way I was going to wait that long.

“Fuck me,” I begged, running my free hand through his messy, long, black hair. His breath slowly trailed up my left thigh, making its way to my hand before stopping to kiss my ring. “I love you.” He smirked and moved his attention up further to my pajama shirt. “Aaron—” I gasped as he snaked his free hand under my shirt, moving it up torturously slow, and then he pushed the scrunched fabric into my open mouth. I moaned a protest.

“Just let me please you, baby girl.” He nipped at my collarbone, leaving a hickey and making me squeeze his hand. “That was for eavesdropping last night.” I glared at him. Hotch smirked and massaged my thigh with a rough palm. “Don’t make me tie you up when we’re celebrating.”

“Please…” My plea was muffled behind my shirt, but the message was clear enough. I couldn’t wait to marry him, but I also couldn’t wait to have him inside me that morning, and I could tell he felt that same way, too. “Sir, please.”

“Shhh…” he cooed, sliding his middle finger into me slowly without warning. I gasped and arched my back. He pulled my shirt out of my mouth so that he could hear my uncontrollable sounds of pleasure. “Good girl.” He curled his finger. “I love you so much.” I swallowed his words as we kissed passionately. We both moaned. “Say yes again for me. Please.”

“Yes,” I repeated breathlessly. “Yes, I’ll marry you—” I gasped again when his index finger joined his middle finger deep inside of me. “Yes, yes, ye— Fuck.”

“I love you.”

“I love you,” I mumbled while kissing him again.

Hotch smiled against me, then added his ring finger inside of me and pressed his thumb against my clit. I moaned. As he started rubbing fast figure eights around my sensitive clit, I squeezed his hand, feeling my ring move slightly around my finger. I was going to be his. I mean, I was _always_ his, but now I was going to be his wife. Every time the ring shifted or dug into my skin, I was reminded of that. He loved me. He wanted to marry me. We always talked about getting married, yet all it took was another year since New York for him to pluck up the courage to finally ask.

“My fiancé,” I suddenly said.

Hotch froze for a second so that he could sit back and come to terms with what I had just said. I started getting worried that I said something wrong. When I tried to backpedal, Hotch’s smile only grew, and his fingers started fucking in and out of me as fast as he could. “Mine.”

“Yours.”

He squeezed my hand tighter. “ _Mine_ ,” he growled roughly.

I nodded while throwing my head back into the pillows. I was breathless and speechless now. With his pace and force, I knew that I wasn’t going to last long, especially since he then decided to start hitting my g-spot over and over again for the sole purpose of making me cum as fast and hard as possible. He threatened to tie me up, but really, he just wanted to make me feel good as a reminder that I was his, and nothing was ever going to change that. Cumming around his fingers was the truest way of my body telling him: “I love you”. As my walls clenched around him and my body shook, my free hand fisted around the sheets.

“Thank you, Sir!” I cried out.

“Shhh,” he insisted with a giggle, silencing me with a kiss. When I stopped making noise, he pulled back. My orgasm faded, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath. “You have to be quiet.” He curled his fingers in me.

I whimpered again. “I can’t.”

“I’ll gag you.”

“Sorry, Sir,” I apologized quietly. “I need you,” I whispered, bringing my hand from the sheets to his hair. I pulled lightly at the strands. “Please, Sir.” He slowly slid his fingers out of me, letting me adjust to the feeling of being empty.

Hotch brought his fingers to my mouth. “Maybe now you’ll stay quiet.” He pressed his fingers against my tongue gently, making my jaw go slack. “Don’t stop,” he commanded while sitting back so that he could push his pants down using his free hand—but in order to do that, he had to release my hand that had the new engagement ring hugging my finger. As his pants slid to his knees, Hotch pulled his fingers out of my mouth. “Say it again.”

It didn’t matter how many times he needed to hear it, because I would tell him every single time. Yes, a million times, yes. Yes, until I couldn’t breathe. Yes, until it was official. Yes, every day for the rest of my life. I wasn’t going to let him go. After nearly three years of chasing this day around, of promising each other that we would finally have this moment, it had come. I’d say yes for that reason. And, in a month, when we would get married, I would say the words: “I do”, too.

“Look at me,” he said, lifting my chin with his thumb after I did as I was told. My gaze met his. “I love you, Y/N. More than anything in the world.” He hovered over me. “I don’t want to spend another day of my life without you.”

I ran both of my hands down his back, finding the bottom hem of his shirt, then sliding it up until it was at his shoulders, at which point, I needed his help getting it all the way off. Hotch sat up and eagerly tore his shirt off. Within an instant, he was hovering over me again, his thumb back on my chin. We stared at each other for another moment. His erection pressed against my wet slit, sliding up and down slowly. I dug my fingers into his shoulders in order to brace myself, which only earned a slight groan then smirk from Hotch.

“My fiancé,” he whispered to me this time while he slowly entered me. I moaned as he stretched me. No matter how many times he fucked me; no matter how hard he would fuck me; no matter what he did to me, he was always going to fit tight like that. I fucking loved it. I loved him. “Fuck,” he groaned, bottoming out inside of me. Every inch of him pulsed as I adjusted around him, giving us both time to catch our breath and find our bearings. And then he slowly slid out of me. When his tip was teasing my entrance again, he snapped his hips forward without warning, making me jolt and dig my nails into his back. “Fuck—” He was getting too loud now, so I had to make both of us stay quiet by kissing him urgently.

The faster he went, the harder and more desperate his thrusts got. As my legs wrapped around his hips to give him a better angle in order to get _every_ inch of him inside of me, Hotch took my hands off of his back and pinned them over my head to show his dominance once more. For us, this sex was pretty vanilla. I mean, I don’t think the two of us ever had plain, old, missionary, boring, no spice sex. That just wasn’t for us. Even when we were trying to be cliché and disgustingly in love in moments like these, there still had to be a chance for Hotch to physically tell me that I was his, and there was nothing I could do about it. Normally, restraints did the trick. Losing all control so that Hotch could do with me as he pleased was the best way to say to each other that I belonged to him. Most people didn’t understand that. In fact, most people disliked the idea of a woman submitting entirely for a man for his pleasure—but it wasn’t really all about that. Giving myself to him wholly was for my benefit, too. There wasn’t anything Hotch and I did that we didn’t both agree to and like. I knew that I trusted, understood, and loved him enough to know that I wanted to spend the rest of my life like this. Everything from our definition of vanilla to the kinkiest, dirtiest things we had ever done were free reign. And they made me happy.

When I struggled against his hold, Hotch was only encouraged to pin me with more force. “Stop,” he demanded gruffly between kisses. I moaned into his mouth. “Be a good girl and keep your hands there.” When he was sure that I understood his command, he slowly started releasing my wrists, just to test the waters and make sure I wouldn’t be a brat and try to move anyways. I kept still, though. I held my hands together, my fingers fiddling with the engagement ring that felt so foreign. “So good for me.” He moved his hands to my breasts and squeezed them gently, which also happened to help brace him so that he could maintain his power and speed.

“Sir… Please…”

He pinched my nipples as punishment for speaking out of turn. As I thrashed under him, he smirked, and pulled gently at the sensitive nubs. He knew what I wanted. He knew that I needed him to touch my clit to help tip me over the edge, but he wasn’t there yet. He wasn’t ready to have me break for him yet. Whenever we were more “vanilla” like this, he always valued climaxing at the same time as me. When he was buried inside of me, I came when he came. That was the silent rule. That was how it had always been, and that was how it would always be.

I clenched around him to encourage his orgasm. He groaned and fell forward involuntarily. “Baby girl,” he growled into my ear, “if you keep doing that, I’ll—” His breath sputtered when I did it again. “Fuck…” Ignoring his command to hold my hands above my head, I reached out to touch his abs. He removed his hands from my breast. Before I could reach him, Hotch gripped my wrists as hard as he could. “Stop—” he thrusted into me. “Stop being a brat.”

“That’s not fun, though,” I pouted, trying to fight against him.

He squinted at me. Pinning my hands above my head again, he towered over me and fucked into me as hard as he could, only this time, he didn’t stop. He just kept going. No matter how much I fought against him, or squeezed my walls around his length, he didn’t stop. I leaned up to kiss his lips. Giving into that one show of affection, Hotch kissed me back, moaning into my mouth as he got closer.

“Cum in me,” I mumbled between kisses. Really, it was to say, mark me as yours in one extra way. Love me. Fuck me. Make me yours. “Sir, please.” One of his hands gave up on pinning me so that he could start rubbing my clit. The second I felt the stimulation, I arched my back, our stomachs pressing against each other. He was close now. He wasn’t on the brink yet because that tell hadn’t approached yet, but he was making his way there, which was why he was suddenly giving me the pleasure I desperately needed.

“I love you, baby.” He leaned down a little further so that he could start nipping at my neck, leaving an obvious hickey. Yet another way of marking me. The ring, the hickey, his cum—I was _his_. “Fuck… Shit…” He was breathless now, his thrusts getting increasingly sloppy, the endless curse words falling from his lips like a mindless prayer. There was his tell. That was how I knew he was finally on the brink. So, as my own orgasm started to reach its peak, I clenched around him again. Hotch moved his fingers faster since he couldn’t fuck me at a sustained pace anymore. “ _Fuck!_ ” He slumped forward as his cock twitched inside of me. “Fuck—”

“I’m gonna—” My hips wriggled around helplessly as I came. I tightened around him, pulsing, clenching and releasing, gushing. Hotch was pressed into me as far as physically possible. He stilled as he came, too. He squeezed my hand to keep him steady as he pushed through the sensitivity of my warmth and softness. I whined when his thumb didn’t move away from me. “Aaron, I can’t…” He understood. He took his thumb away, but he still didn’t pull out of me. His orgasm had passed, every drop of him sitting deep inside of me, his length slowly softening. But he didn’t move. “Aaron.”

“I just want to savor it a little longer…” he whispered into my ear. I felt him start to turn my engagement ring over and over on my finger. “Thank you, baby.”

My free hand found its way to his hair. I tangled my fingers around the long strands. I knew why he was saying thank you, even though he certainly didn’t have to; but I still appreciated it, and I wanted him to know it. “Yes,” I repeated for him. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Hotch chuckled. “Good.” He finally sat up and slid out of me carefully. “I love you.” He brought my hand to his lips, kissing the ring again. “I love you so much.”

I sat up, too. “I love you. _My fiancé_ ,” I teased.


	39. WEDDING DAY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Light smut!! I don’t think anything gets out of hand in this chapter. Talk of BDSM, Dom/sub relationship, etc. I think that’s it? SAVE YOUR SIMPING FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER! The black box is coming. Good lord...
> 
> TIMELINE: One month after part thirty-eight.

The weekend of our wedding was chaotic, to say the least. On Friday, the boys (including Morgan, Reid, Rossi, and Anderson) stole Aaron away for a bachelor party who knew where. It happened as we were walking to our car after work. We stepped out of the building together, hand in hand, having just finished saying goodbye to the security team in the lobby. We barely stepped off the sidewalk when Rossi approached from behind us, a car pulled up in front of us, the door back door opening, and Rossi rushed to get Hotch into the car. I sighed and yelled at Morgan, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, to not let Aaron get into too much trouble. And then they sped off.

I shook off the smile on my face and continued to our car a few rows back in the parking lot. From a distance, I saw Emily leaning against the hood of the car. Well, the boys had stolen Hotch off for a boy’s weekend, and it seemed that the girls were stealing me off for a bachelorette party. I held my hands up in surrender. Next thing I knew, Emily was wearing a smirk as she handcuffed my left wrist to her right wrist. She didn’t release me until we arrived at a spa retreat out in the middle of nowhere in Virginia. It was Garcia’s idea.

“Tada!” Garcia cheered, her arms stretched into the air, her fingers jazz-dancing. “Do you like it?”

I rubbed my wrist as the handcuff fell off. “I love it.”

“Good, because we’re here until Sunday afternoon,” Emily whispered in my ear.

Because Hotch and I were in such a rush to get married on our anniversary, which was on a Monday, we had to make sure that the BAU got a long weekend, that Jack’s school was aware he wouldn’t be in class, and that everyone else we were inviting (friends and family) knew that they would have to miss some work. The good news was that all of Hotch’s friends were prosecutors and Bureaucrats, so it was fairly easy to get them out of work. When we told the Director that we were getting married, he insisted that we invite him and give him the list of Bureaucrats we were inviting so that he could ensure that they got that Monday off. As for who I was inviting, the list was pretty limited since my friends were all in the FBI, and the one person from my past that I would’ve considered inviting was off the grid. She did that a lot. So, we kept it small. It was going to be lavish, but small. And that was okay. I didn’t need a big, ostentatious wedding. I just needed my future husband, the team, and my parents. But Hotch needed everyone to know that he was marrying me.

When we found out that the team was planning on kidnapping us for separate weekend-long celebrations, Hotch and I started talking in the roundtable room as the team was filing in about how we wanted the night before the wedding all to ourselves. We tried playing it cool by stopping when someone would enter the room; but we knew that they were listening. So, when Emily told me that we were leaving the spa retreat on Sunday afternoon, I was relieved. Hotch and I were going to have Sunday night all to ourselves. Wonderful.

Sunday didn’t matter when we were out at that retreat, though. We spent Friday night in a jacuzzi together, sipping on wine and gossiping. Unfortunately, I had to stop drinking because it was upsetting my stomach, but Garcia seemed to drink _for me_. JJ and I laughed at her when she downed the glass I couldn’t finish. When we were all pruning, we went inside the cabin the girls all contributed to renting at the retreat for the weekend. We slid into pajamas, grabbed a bunch of blankets, and we laid on the floor in the living room, a fresh log fire beside us. JJ was responsible for bringing the shitty snacks. Since this was supposed to be a “healthy spa”, they didn’t necessarily supply snacks like Cheetos, chips, chocolate, etc. JJ already had most of that laying around at home because of Henry, so she told Emily and Garcia that she would bring the food, and that she did. Since Garcia was drinking for me, and Emily was trying to catch up to her, I stuck to the chocolate.

Time passed by so fast. I didn’t even get tired. We all crashed in the early hours of the morning, but all I could do was smile up at the ceiling while listening to Garcia snore. I was happy. My wedding was approaching, and I was with a handful of the people I loved most on planet Earth. I didn’t need anything else… Except a massage. Thankfully, my wish was granted, because, when I was woken up by Emily, we headed for breakfast at the meal hall, then went to the spa cabin where Garcia had scheduled our massages. Garcia was hungover, of course. Getting her to the meal hall was hard enough, but dragging her out of the spa once our hour long massages were done was a near impossible task.

By the time lunch came around, Garcia was passed out in the bed she had claimed as hers when we first arrived. JJ, Emily, and I gave up on her. We decided to get lunch without her, then, when we were done, we were going to watch a movie in the cabin.

The biggest bed in the cabin was a California King that Emily and I were supposed to share. However, the three of us managed to sit—or, in my case, _lay_ —comfortably on the bed while watching Pride and Prejudice, which was JJ’s idea.

“If Hotch doesn’t say something as romantic as that on Monday,” Emily said after Mr. Darcy had proclaimed his love for Elizabeth for the first time, “then I’m pulling you off the altar, and I’m going to marry you myself.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” I answered, playing along with her tease.

I fell asleep before the movie ended. When I woke up, I saw that Emily and JJ had fallen asleep, too, but they were wrapped in each other’s arms. I eyed them suspiciously for a moment before rolling out of bed to head to the bathroom. I really shouldn’t’ve eaten that much chocolate last night. My stomach was killing me, and I blamed it all on the snacks JJ brought.

“Y/N,” Emily’s voice followed a knock on the door, “are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just under the weather.”

“Nerves?”

“Or chocolate.”

She laughed. “Okay. Well, Garcia’s up, and she’s hungry, so we’re going to head to the meal hall, if you want to join us.”

“I’m good. Thanks.”

“We’ll check on you when we come back.”

They technically never got that chance because I fell back asleep soon after they left. It was supposed to be a relaxing weekend, and I was certainly taking them up on the opportunity. Considering Hotch and I were going to have the night before the wedding to ourselves, then our entire honeymoon, and then the rest of our lives… I knew I was going to be restless for a while. Besides, sleep was good. With our busy schedules, we hardly got a weekend to just relax. I liked that I got to spend all of this time with the girls, then sleep as much as I wanted, and I could rinse and repeat that cycle until Sunday afternoon.

And I did. By the time Sunday afternoon came around, I packed up my bag (the one Emily had packed for me without my knowing on Friday when she left for her lunch break), and we headed home. Garcia was not allowed to drive. She and I slept most of the drive home, my house being the first stop.

“Don’t let him leave any hickeys,” Emily warned as I got out of the car.

I chuckled. “No hickeys, must have a speech superior to Mr. Darcy’s, and…”

“And no breaking your heart. Ever.”

“And no breaking my heart. Got it. I’ll let him know.”

“Have fun,” JJ teased with a sing-song voice. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow!”

“Bye, my loves.”

“Bye…” Garcia groaned.

The three of us laughed at her before I waved to them while they slowly traveled down the neighborhood’s street. When they turned out of sight, I headed up to the house, unlocked the door, turned off the alarm, then headed to the kitchen to get a glass of water. My stomach had stopped hurting, but now I had a raging headache. I swore then and there that if I was sick on our wedding day, I was going to call every single person invited in order to tell them that the wedding was off before leaving to elope with Hotch.

“You’re back,” Hotch noted happily as he stepped into the kitchen.

“Headache,” I pointed to my temple.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “I’ll get you a Motrin.”

“Wait—”

“What?”

I grabbed his hand and pulled him towards me. “I love you.” I jumped up on my toes and kissed him gingerly. “How was your weekend?”

“I don’t think Morgan understands that strip clubs aren’t my thing.”

“It was more for them than you.”

“I know.”

“You got a lap dance, though, right?” I questioned with a grin.

“No!” he defended.

“Why not?” I pouted at him and played with the hem of his V-neck. “It would have been fun for you.” I ran my hands over his chest. “Wasn’t that the point of your weekend?”

Hotch wrapped his arms around my waist. “The only person I want to ever look at or touch is you.” He kissed me. “So, how ‘bout a lap dance—”

“Headache,” I reminded him.

“You’re a tease.”

“I know. _Sir_.”

He laughed and kissed my forehead gently to help heal my headache, then he left to get me a Motrin, like he promised. I made my way to the living room. Since Jessica must have been in on the weekend plans, Jack was spending the weekend at her house. We didn’t have to worry about looking after a kid for at least another two weeks because we were leaving for our honeymoon on Tuesday, and because Monday would be our wedding night… Well, Jessica had offered to just look after him until we got back from our vacation. No kid, just us. As much as I loved Jack, I also loved the idea of just getting to spend _a lot_ of one-on-one time with Aaron. If we had met at a different point in our lives, a point where he didn’t have a kid, and might not have ever been married to Haley, then it was possible that Hotch and I would have done everything the classic, boring way. Date for a few years, get engaged, stay engaged for at least a year, then get married, go on vacation, _then_ have a kid. That would have left us with years of alone time. But since we had Jack to look after—not that I minded that one bit— everything was backwards; and with the chaos and tragedy in our lives, we were in a rush to be the classic, boring, nuclear family.

Mom, dad, and kid. That was everyone’s dream, right? The big house, the perfect family, and maybe even a pet to make everyone happy. But we already had the big house and the perfect family. All that was left to do now was make it all official with the wedding certificate and the rings on our fingers. I’d be content at that point.

“Motrin, a heating pad, a blanket, and your favorite pillow,” Hotch said, entering the room with full hands.

I craned my neck to watch him walk around the back of the couch. “You’re amazing.” I took the Motrin from him as he sat down. “Thank you, baby.”

“Of course.”

Hotch shook out the blanket before laying it over my body, then plugged in the heating pad so that I could rest it on the back of my neck. By the time he had me situated, I was already relaxed. When he sat down beside me, he put my favorite pillow on his lap, a silent signal that he wanted me to lay down on him so that he could play with my hair until I could fall asleep.

“I know that this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when we were talking about spending the night together,” I said apologetically. “I’m sorry.” He shushed me. “I haven’t been feeling well all weekend. It’s my own damn fault for eating that chocolate.”

“You’re here. That’s all that matters to me.”

I closed my eyes in response to the comforting feel of his fingers combing through my hair. When we had been talking about spending this night together, I imagined that I’d be tied to the bed with Hotch between my legs, torturing me endlessly. This was nice, though, like he said. It wasn’t imperative for us to have sex in order to be intimate. Yeah, it didn’t suck, but we were going to have plenty of time to tie each other up and fuck each other until we couldn’t breathe. Hell, we had our whole lives to do that. For now, I enjoyed just lying down on his lap, curled under a blanket, falling asleep as he massaged my scalp to ease my headache.

* * *

Monday morning, I woke up in our bed upstairs, Hotch cuddled up against my back. I smiled and kissed his knuckles. Hotch shuffled behind me as he was coaxed awake by my touch. Telling by the time, JJ, Emily, and Garcia were going to pick me up soon, but I didn’t want to leave our bed just yet. I was excited to get to the venue, but I was also fine where I was. Maybe we could just get married in bed.

“Good morning, my love,” he whispered groggily in my ear.

I hummed. “Good morning.”

“Is your headache gone?”

“Yeah. Did you carry me up here?”

“We fell asleep on the couch, and I woke up around seven, so I decided to bring you up here instead of leaving you down there.”

“Thank you.” I rolled over and kissed him, our eyes still shut. “I’m sorry, again, for last night.”

“Don’t be.”

“We could…” my hands drifted down his chest, “do something now…”

He moaned and tensed under my touch. “I thought we have to leave soon to get ready.”

“We’ll make enough time…”

“Not enough time for the black box, though.”

“We’ll just take it with us on the honeymoon.”

He grabbed my chin roughly. “Mmm… so, you want to be ruined for two weeks straight?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Hotch rolled on top of me, kissing me so roughly I couldn’t move or breathe. “Screaming my name and cumming for me over and over again?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“You’re always so needy for me.”

“Only for you, Sir—” I groaned with annoyance when my phone started ringing on my bedside table. “Just ignore it.” I grabbed his face to make him kiss me again. When the call went to voicemail, Hotch rolled his hips against mine, letting me feel how hard he was getting. “Sir…” And then the doorbell rang. “No,” I groaned again.

Hotch leaned back. “I think it’s time to go.”

“Can’t they wait?” I asked, running my index finger over the outline of his erection through his pajama pants. He moaned and fell forward. “Please?” The doorbell rang again, but this time, it didn’t stop. It kept ringing over and over again until it got annoying. “I’m going to fucking kill them.”

“You have to go.”

“I don’t want to yet.”

“I’ll see you in a few hours when you come down the aisle. Aren’t you excited for that?”

I nodded. “But what about you?” I asked, referencing his erection.

“I’ll handle it. You’ll have two weeks to make it up to me.”

I pouted, then kissed him again. “She’s not going to stop ringing the doorbell,” I said, rolling out of bed. Hotch sighed, falling onto his back, his hand snaking under the waistband of his pants to palm himself. I rubbed my thighs together at the sight. “I’m going to kill Emily Prentiss,” I said to myself.

When I opened the front door, Emily was snatching her hand away from the doorbell on the doorframe. She smiled innocently. I told her that I needed to change into something comfortable, then I would meet them in the car.

I was not responsible for my dress, my shoes, my jewelry, or anything of the sort. My mom was responsible for making sure all of that arrived at the venue on time. My job was to show up. That was it. I made it very clear to everyone that those who were showing up to the venue early had a responsibility. If something were to go wrong, it had to make it up a chain of command before getting to me. If something couldn’t be handled by JJ or Penelope, then it made its way to Emily, my maid of honor (since I didn’t have anyone else coming that I was as close to. She was one of my partners in the field, so it only made sense to ask her to do it.) If Emily couldn’t handle it, my mom probably could. _If_ , by some off chance, my mother couldn’t take care of it, _then_ it could become my problem. Other than that, I just wanted to sit in the bridal suite. I wanted to get ready in peace, have fun with my friends for a few hours before the ceremony, and talk with my mom. That was it. If anything or anyone were going to bother me, I was going to be pissed. I didn’t want to be a bridezilla, but it was reasonable for me to request an entire day off, alright.

Hotch was cleaning himself up in the shower while I got dressed in one of his college hoodies and a pair of leggings. Before I could even hear him start washing his hair, I was out the door and in the car with JJ, Garcia, and Emily again. Garcia seemed much better than the last time I saw her. She wasn’t completely out of it, which was a plus, considering I wanted her to be _there_ for the day. Besides, if she showed up still hungover, I think I would be in more trouble than her when Morgan would have found out.

When we arrived at the venue, JJ parked to the side so that the vendors could move about freely within the parking lot; then, when they were done setting up inside, there would just be more space for the guests to park. We had found this amazing, quaint place that was surprisingly cheap. The building itself almost looked like a warehouse—but it was all sandstone brick and glass. It was one floor, but the walls were ridiculously tall, and the glass ceiling inside in some of the rooms made it feel only that much bigger. The set up of the building inside was like a square donut. There was the main lobby when we first walked in, but just behind that was a hallway on either side of the front desk, and just between those two hallways was a glass door that led to the huge open-air courtyard where a vendor was setting up all of the foldable white chairs for the guests during the ceremony.

Garcia pulled me down the left hallway before I could stare at the courtyard for too long. The left side of the building, for our purposes, was reserved as the bride’s suite. Meanwhile, the right side was for the boys. My mom was adamant about Hotch not seeing me at all after leaving our house up until the ceremony. All of the superstitions about a groom seeing the bride in her dress before the actual wedding had tricked my mother into thinking that if Aaron happened to waltz into the wrong room, I’d topple over and die right then and there. So, he was supposed to stay away. The boys had the entire right side of the donut, and the girls had the left side. It was fair enough.

When we stepped into one of the large rooms that had been designated as the suite itself, I saw my mom standing in front of a tall clothing rack where my dress was hanging. She was fussing with it. If there was even _one_ wrinkle, my mother snuffed it out. She was going to do whatever it took to make sure that dress looked good, even if it killed her sanity. But, she stopped for a moment when she heard the door open, and she turned to see that it was us, and she smiled.

“Finally,” she cheered, flinging her arms around me.

I hugged her back. “Hi, Mom.”

“You look pale.”

“I wasn’t feeling well yesterday.”

“What is it?” She released me from our embrace. Her motherly worry was plastered to her face, and she’s trying to figure out what was wrong with me before I could even respond.

I shook my head. “Chocolate and nerves. It’s nothing, Mom.”

“Well, we’ll just cover it all up with makeup, anyhow.” She pointed to the makeup artist and hair stylist that were getting their things set up to the side. “Don’t even worry about it.” She peered over my shoulder to look at the girls. “Champagne and snacks are on the table over there,” she pointed to the left, “hair and makeup will call each of you over one at a time,” she pointed back at the two women who were still getting set up, “and then your dresses are hanging over there,” she pointed to the right where a clothing rack on wheels was holding up the dresses they bought—since Hotch and I weren’t exactly doing the whole bridesmaids and groomsmen thing.

If it were up to my mother, we would have had a much bigger and extravagant celebration with a wedding party and everything, but I argued against it. The compromise was that my mom could pay for ridiculous things like champagne and snacks, while I got to decide that the ceremony would be small, short, and easy. So, my mom offered to pay for the girls’ dresses and the guys’ tuxes, as long as I got to stay adamant about not having matching dresses and having them walk down the aisle before me. My mom was fine with that.

“The bride goes last,” Mom continued. “So, just sit down and relax for a bit, baby.” She gestured to the two large couches over by the champagne and snacks, silently telling us to sit down and stay out of the way until we were called up to do something important.

I threw my hands up in surrender. There was really no point in fighting my mother about all of this, especially on an important day like my wedding. She was a… controlling woman. Elle got that from her. My mother liked knowing that everything was perfect and that she could handle it all herself, and if I got in the way by arguing, I was going to lose that fight. Not that I even wanted to try. Like I said, I wanted to lay back and relax. I was going to keep my feet up until I had to get into my dress and walk down the aisle towards Hotch, and then, I’d crash again.

“Want any?” JJ asked, holding up the bottle of champagne for me to see the offer. I shook my head. She cocked a brow at me, eyes searching all of me for answers. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” Garcia asked worriedly.

I shook my head. “Of course not.” I sat down abruptly. “I’m just nervous.”

“What’s there to be nervous about?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted with a laugh.

The four of us reclined, but the three of them kept chatting while I sat by, watching as they drank champagne. There wasn’t a reason to be nervous. I knew that. Of course I knew that. I loved Aaron, he loved me, and we wanted to get married more than anything. This had been our dream for a few years, but it never worked out for one reason or another. But, finally, the timing worked out. Finally, there was nothing standing in our way… and yet, I was still panicking. I didn’t doubt that this was the right thing to do and that we would be happy together. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was that really had me all wound up.

And then my mom whistled lightly from the doorway. Growing up, that was her call to me and Elle whenever we were out in public and she needed us to be by her side and behaving within an instant. I’d recognize that whistle anywhere. It was like saying: “Mom needs you now, and if you don’t come over here, she’s going to be mad.” So, I pushed myself to my feet and headed to the door,

“What is it?” I asked. “Is it Aaron?”

My mom chuckled at my panic. “No. He’s okay. Your dad’s giving him a hard time, but he’s okay, I promise. I need to show you something, though.” She grabbed my hand and snuck me out of the room before anyone could notice because the girls’ attention was on Garcia, who was sliding into her dress now. I followed my mom with a hesitant stride. “Come on, it’s a good surprise, Y/N.”

“I don’t understand—Shouldn’t I be getting into my dress?”

“In a minute. You’ll want to see this first.” She opened the back door of the venue, leading us into the alleyway. I cocked a concerned brow at my mother. “There.” She pointed, and I followed her gaze.

There was a figure standing in the shadows, hiding their face under the hood they were wearing, and their figure was hidden under all of the layers. It didn’t make any sense. Who the hell was that? Why would my mother risk bringing me out here? I tried asking my mom, but she only pushed me forward as an encouragement. I rolled my eyes and walked a few more steps towards the stranger.

And then I stumbled to a halt. Her face was familiar, like I had only seen her just yesterday, but everything else about her was different. Her hair, her style, her posture, even the way she did her makeup. She was half a stranger, half a reminder of home and family. A shuddered breath left my lips.

“Elle…”

When I saw her smile back at me and open her arms for a hug, I ran to her and crashed against her chest. Her arms wrapped around me tightly. I hugged her waist, squeezing her until she tapped on my shoulder for me to release.

“What are you doing here? I didn’t know how to invite you—”

“Mom sent me the invite,” Elle answered. I smiled against her shoulder and squeezed harder. She laughed at how she couldn’t breathe now. “I had to see you.”

“Wait ‘til I tell Aaron and Derek; they’ll be so excited!”

Elle suddenly pushed me out of our hug so that I could see her stern face. “You can’t tell anyone I was here, Y/N.”

“What?”

“Especially Hotch.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want you to worry about it.” She grabbed my hands before making me spin around in a small circle for her. “Look at you!”

I wasn’t fooled, however, by her attempt to distract me from what was really going on. All this time, I didn’t know why she left, where she went, what she was doing, and I certainly didn’t think anyone had contact with her, let alone my parents. When I thought about inviting her, I tried calling her old phone number, which had been disconnected. When I tried her email, it didn’t go through. And when I asked my parents if they knew anything, they said that they would handle it. Of course, I didn’t understand what that meant at the time. But now that my sister was standing in front of me for the first time in two and a half years, I thought I would want to be happy and distracted with her, but now I just wanted answers. So, I asked. All of these burning questions that had been churning in my head over the past few years finally spewed out of me. There was nothing I could do to stop or control it. There was just so much, yet so little time.

Elle looked at the ground and kicked a pebble around. “It was just in everyone’s best interest if I left,” she finally said. That wasn’t a real answer. We both knew that it wasn’t enough for me, yet… I didn’t fight. It was the weirdest thing. For once, when it came to Elle, I didn’t pry. “I’m really happy for you, Y/N.” She looked up at me and smiled. It wasn’t faux or forced. It was a genuine smile that she always wore.

I couldn’t believe I almost forgot how much her smile made my day, and how her laugh was like music to my ears, and how much I just fucking missed her. She had been gone so long, she had turned into a distant memory in the back of my mind. Now that she was there, however, everything was returning to me like she hadn’t been gone even a day.

“You’re not going to come in; are you?” I questioned, my smile fading. Hers disappeared, too. “Morgan and Reid miss you a lot. I know they would really love to just see you one more time—”

“Y/N, I can’t. I made promises to people, and I made promises to myself. This part of my life is behind me.”

“So, then, what are you doing with your life?”

“Traveling. A lot.”

I smiled. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling back. “I always wanted to get out and see the world, you know that.”

Actually, no, I didn’t know that. Elle had a very specific idea as to what her life would look like, and I knew what those plans were because it was practically the same dream I had for myself, too. Because of her dad, she wanted to become a cop, so she did. Because of my dad, I wanted to join the FBI, so I did. There was never any mention of getting out to see the world. How could we afford to go traveling all the time when our careers always came first to everything else? She had been doing so well for herself in Seattle, and then she joined the BAU. Things were really working out for her. Yet, the one time she decided to travel outside of the country for vacation, her entire life fell apart. One would think that experience would have stayed her secret urge to travel. However, it didn’t. I couldn’t blame her, though, for wanting to get out and travel the world, if that was really what she wanted, and if she was happy doing it—and it seemed like she was _really_ happy. That was all I ever wanted for her. So, I didn’t argue.

“What have you been doing while traveling?” I asked. The FBI paid well, but not well enough to travel and spend money for the rest of her life without working.

“Oh, you know…” she trailed off. I shook my head because I didn’t know. She was being awfully vague and awkward. Maybe it was just the fact that we hadn’t talked in so long, so there was a disconnect; but we had gone decades without talking while she was working sex crimes in Seattle and I was stuck in Quantico. This was no different than that. So, what gave? “Partying and boys, mostly.”

I squinted at her. “You’re not working at all?”

“I don’t need to. I keep a pretty low profile while I’m out there.”

“Someone’s coming,” Mom hissed from the back door of the venue just down the alley.

When I turned to give her an acknowledging nod, I suddenly felt Elle crash into _me_ for another hug. She wasn’t a big hugger. In fact, Elle struggled most times with any kind of affection. I was pretty sure that it stemmed from the fact that she lost her father, her favorite person, when she was really young, and she didn’t know how to cope with that loss. Our mom wasn’t a very affectionate person either, which was possibly where Elle got it from, but it also made sense that Mom didn’t know how to console and love Elle the same way her dad, which was just another disconnect to the idea of affection for her. But there were moments like these where Elle would find courage within herself to show her love for me. A hug was so small. Jack and Hotch hugged me all the time. Morgan and Emily hugged me all the time. I was a big hugger. Not Elle, though. That was why this had caught me so off guard, and actually made me break into tears.

“I don’t want you to go,” I whispered into her hair.

“I know.”

“ _Elle_ ,” Mom hissed another warning.

So, Elle released me from her embrace. “I’ll see you around.”

I knew that was a lie. There was no way she was ever going to come back again. I could see it in her eyes and in her behavior. Sometimes, especially in moments like these, I really hated being a profiler. “I’ll see you around.”

Elle smiled lightly at me as she pulled the hood of her jacket over her head, then turned on her heels and calmly made her way out of the alley while keeping her head down.

“What are you two doing out here?” Dad asked, walking into past Mom to see me standing alone in the alleyway. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting into your dress?”

Mom hit his bicep, then started pulling him back inside. “Stop messing with perfection.”

Even though they were divorced, the two of them were still close, and they were comfortable with playing around like that. They almost reminded me of how I was around Morgan. We were serious, but we loved each other, and we knew how to be silly in order to show affection and lighten the cloudy days of our lives. My mom and dad did all of those things, too. It was a wonder they got divorced in the first place. I mean, now that I was older, and there was hindsight and all, I knew that they got divorced because their jobs got in the way; the same reason Hotch and Haley got a divorce. They still loved each other, and they still loved me and Elle, but it was just hard for them to be apart so often. Mom was always off traveling the world for the CIA, meanwhile Dad was stuck at the Academy, teaching a bunch of kids whose dream was to be in the FBI, just like mine had always been. They just got busy. Work got in the way, but they never fell out of love.

Honestly, though, that was the reason I had so much hope for mine and Hotch’s relationship. We worked together. Our time at work and home were spent together. There were only a handful of times when we really missed each other; but we always knew that we would come back together and keep working cases together, or go home to fuck each other until our minds stopped working. We worked because of that. Our job didn’t get in the way of our relationship, which meant that it was just one less thing we had to worry about.

Mom poked her head back out of the venue to ask if I was alright. When I nodded and forced a smile onto my face, she invited me back inside, and led me to the bridal suite so that I could get my hair and make up done before sliding into my dress. “Guests are starting to show up,” she explained frantically while pushing me into the hair and makeup seat. The two women who had just finished getting JJ ready immediately started attacking my hair and face before I could even register what the hell was happening.

“Can you let me know if Sean shows up?” I asked.

My mom stared at me with wide eyes through the mirror. “You invited him? Why didn’t you—” She sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Does Aaron know?”

“No.” I didn’t tell anyone on purpose.

When I invited Sean, I had done it secretly after Hotch insisted that he didn’t want his brother to be a part of the ceremony as best man or groom—or whatever the hell we were doing. After Haley’s funeral, when we realized that Sean hadn’t shown up, Hotch promised that he was done with his brother for good. But I just couldn’t let them fall out like this. To be fair, a lot of people didn’t come to Haley’s funeral for one reason or another. I knew that Sean was somewhat of a fuck up, but he didn’t deserve to be punished for showing up to Hotch’s ex-wife’s funeral… Right?

By the time I was done getting “prettied up”, as my mother would put it, and I shimmied into my dress, there was still no news of Sean, or, frankly, Elle. Some part of me held out hope that she would have turned around to come back and see me walk down the aisle. Maybe I was foolish. But I always thought that my sister would be there for my wedding day. Even though she and I didn’t exactly get along sometimes, and there was a fair period of time where we didn’t talk, I imagined that she would be there. I imagined that she would be celebrating this day with me. Perhaps that was why I had invited Sean, too, because Hotch secretly felt the same way about having his brother there. Maybe the two of us were just destined for each other and that was it… We didn’t deserve our families. I mean, Aaron’s family didn’t deserve _him_ ; but I knew that he always wished that he had grown up in a better family. It was a miracle that he turned out the way he did. He was so close to becoming Sean; but he didn’t. That was admirable.

“Everyone decent?” Dad asked after knocking on the door suddenly, snapping me out of my train of thought. Mom told him that he could come in. As he stepped inside, his mouth fell agape, a small smile crawling onto his face. “Y/N…”

“You’re not allowed to cry yet, Ken,” Mom scorned.

“Yes, ma’am.” He saluted her. As she rolled her eyes and giggled at his silliness, she started ushering the girls out of the bridal suite so that they could go find seats at the ceremony and let everyone know that we were about to start. The door closed behind them. “You ready for this?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“It’s not too late to back out now,” he joked.

“Do you want me to?”

He shook his head. “Not in a million years.”

“You like him, right, Dad?”

He stared at me for a moment, his smile fading so that he could pout at my doubt. “I think he’s perfect for you, Y/N. I’ve never seen you so happy. As long as he makes you happy, and as long as he treats you well, I’ll love him like he’s my own.” I smiled at the ground. “And, no, I don’t think it’s weird that he’s older than you.”

“I know you don’t,” I played along.

He stepped forward and tilted my head up with the side of his curled index finger. “Let’s get the boring part over with, shall we?” I nodded. “Alright.” He turned and opened the door, holding out his arm for me so that I could loop my arm with his.

When we stepped into the hallway, the woman who had done my hair handed me my flower bouquet to carry down the aisle, to which I quietly thanked her for. We traveled down the hall a few steps before I stopped. Dad took a step forward like he was already going to lead me down the aisle, but I felt frozen in place. Deep down, I knew that I was ready to marry Aaron Hotchner. I knew that I wanted nothing more than to finally call myself Y/N Hotchner, and to be his _entirely_. Yet, I couldn’t seem to move my feet. The corner was right there, with the aisle just past it, and Hotch waiting at the end of it. He was waiting for me, and I was _absolutely_ panicking.

I didn’t want us to fail. That was the first time I had admitted it to myself like that. I knew that we were destined for great things and that we loved each other so much, but I was terrified of failing him like Haley failed him. He had been through so much, and I really, _really_ didn’t want to let him down like everyone else had. I knew that he made me happy, and that I made him happy… but what would happen if I ever lost him? I couldn’t bear to think—

“It’s going to be alright,” Dad promised, squeezing my hand.

My breath sputtered as a tear slipped down my cheek. “Were you this scared when you married Mom?”

He smiled and nodded. “I thought that I was going to throw up all over my tux.”

“What helped?”

“Seeing your mom come down the aisle,” he answered quickly, like he had anticipated the question. “I remember that I couldn’t stop shaking and my head wouldn’t stop spinning, but then I saw her, and everything suddenly made sense.” He reached up and wiped the tear from my cheek. “Once you see him, you’ll feel better. I promise.”

“I don’t want to fall over,” I admitted. I was so nervous about taking that first step and tripping over myself. I felt like I could collapse at any second between the panic coursing through my veins and the tightness in my lungs.

“I won’t let you.”

I let my eyes flutter closed before taking in a deep breath, holding it, then slowly releasing it. I did it again, this time a little faster, and my head stopped spinning long enough for me to nod a signal that I was ready. He squeezed my hand again, then took another step, pulling me along carefully. I finally took the first step forward. I felt a sigh of relief leave my chest as I realized that I hadn’t fallen over yet. We took another step, this time with a longer, braver stride, and I felt more confidence wash over me. I was one step closer to seeing him, and that was enough to encourage me to keep going. So, we continued on, one step after the other, slowly gaining speed until we hit the cliché wedding walk pace. We reached the corner, and I closed my eyes again as my breath picked up once more. Hotch was waiting just around the corner. I would see him for the first time on our wedding day, and for the last time as my fiancé. This was real. It was really happening. We were about to do this.

“Just find him and breathe,” my dad whispered.

I nodded again, and he led me around the corner. I opened my eyes as I heard the audience rise to their feet and turn to face me. I looked around the space, spotting the team at the back of the crowd, spread out amongst the bride and groom’s sides. Morgan was standing on my side, just beside the aisle, and he smiled at me. I felt my racing heart slow down a bit when I managed to smile back, but it wasn’t until I looked past the crowd and down the aisle to find Hotch standing with Jack at his side that I finally found tranquility. Every bit of panic left me in one, relieving wave. Every ounce of worry or conflict disappeared without a trace. Just like my dad said, when Hotch’s eyes met mine, I suddenly forgot how scared I was, and I was overwhelmed by happiness and excitement. I felt like I could start running down the aisle now if it meant that I would just be in his arms again.

My eyes pouted, but I smiled at him as brightly as I could. He was smiling back, even though his jaw was practically on the floor in response to seeing me in my dress. And all I could think about was getting to kiss his lips for the first time as his wife. I wished we could skip the whole ceremony altogether and just get to that part. I wished that I could teleport down the aisle and jump into arms, both of us refusing to let go of one another.

We took another step and I watched as Jack looked up at his dad, both of them sharing a smile of excitement between each other. With every row of the crowd we passed, I felt my speed pick up, almost like I was dragging my dad along with _me_ now instead of the other way around. I was in a rush to finally get there, hear that we were married, kiss him, and hold him in my arms forever as husband and wife. There wasn’t a moment to waste.

As we passed the last row, I felt myself nearly trip over my dress as I got a little too excited with my steps. Dad caught me, just like he promised, and I chuckled to myself slightly, looking up at Hotch to see that he was acting like nothing happened. Dad leaned in when we were standing just in front of Hotch, Jack, and the officiant. He kissed my cheek and squeezed my hand one last time before untangling our fingers and unlinking our arms. I felt my nerves return as I realized that there was no one there to hold me upright anymore, no one to catch me if I were to trip again.

I felt my anxiety return, my heart racing in my chest, my blood pumping in my arms, my lungs struggling to take normal breaths, my head beginning to spin. I closed my eyes, trying to find my balance and my ground— and then I felt him. His large hand was over mine on my bouquet, his thick fingers trying to pry my left hand away from the flowers. I let him do as he wished, my eyes fluttering open as he took my hand in his and pulled me towards him carefully.

Hotch’s eyes met mine as he led me to stand closer to him, my right shoulder facing the crowd. We stared at each other with that same light that I noticed every morning when we woke up and he would remember how happy he was to have me there with him. I got lost in his chocolate brown eyes as he lifted his other hand up to my face and brushed some of my hair back behind my ear.

“How obvious was I?” I asked quietly.

Hotch bit back a laugh. “I don’t think anyone noticed.”

“Trick question. If you noticed, everyone noticed,” I snickered. Without warning, he leaned in slowly and pressed a gentle, loving kiss against me. It felt like a ghost had barely kissed me. Just as I felt that he was there, he was gone. “You’re supposed to save that for the end,” I whispered as he pulled away slightly, his breath still hot on my nose.

He kissed me again with the same considerate touch. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“Friends and family,” the officiant began loudly, practically tearing me and Hotch apart due to shock. We giggled at each other quietly. “We’ve gathered here today to celebrate the joyous union of Y/N Greenaway and Aaron Hotchner. As I understand it, the bride and the groom have both prepared something to say before we start with the official vows.”

Hotch nodded, squeezing my hand that he was holding. He released me for a short moment so that he could fish out his speech from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. I giggled at him. He was shaking just as hard as I was, and it was made plain to me when the flimsy paper trembled in his touch. He smiled at my giggle. “The past two years have been… taxing, to say the least. Together, we’ve really been rung through the works, and there were times when I thought we wouldn’t make it to this day for one reason or another. But for the past _three_ years, you have stuck by my side, no matter what, and you’ve given me a reason every day to keep pushing and keep living. I wouldn’t be here today without you. It’s true. Every day, I look at you and Jack, and I remember that I love you both more than anything in the world. I know that I will always fight for you because I love you, and no matter what the world throws at us, that will never change. Your messes are my messes, Y/N. I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world. I swear that from this day on, I will be by your side, supporting every decision you make, cheering you on while you make a difference in the world, and loving you as vigorously as I can until my dying day. I promise to never hold anything back from you—emotionally, physically, spiritually… and, of course, when it comes to secrets. My whole world belongs to you, Y/N, and I want it to remain that way until my last breath, or until the world stops spinning. I love you.”

I smirked and bit my lip. “I love you, too.”

“Stop biting,” he whispered dominantly.

“I can’t help it.”

“Your turn,” the officiant said to me.

“Right—” I said with a laugh. I surprised Hotch by letting go of his hand so that I could dig into the right-side pocket of my dress to retrieve my speech. “ _Pockets_ ,” I teased him. He bit his lip. “Don’t bite.”

“I can’t help it,” he whispered through his teeth.

I rolled my eyes at him before glancing down at my paper. I had written it a thousand times before landing on this version that I was… satisfied with. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough words to tell Hotch how much I loved him. At least, there weren’t the _right_ words. I used what the English vocabulary had available, seeking out some of Reid’s help, if I were being honest, but it still wasn’t exactly what I meant. There would never be a speech long enough to list all of the ways I loved Aaron Hotchner. Even if the words to express my love for him existed, my lungs probably would have given out before I could have finished telling him. The good news was, he knew. Hotch knew the truth. This whole show was for the people we loved, like Jack, my parents, and the team. This was for them to see how infinite my love was for him. Hotch didn’t need to hear it. Every kiss I pressed to his lips was my way of telling him in the only way that made sense. Telling him: “I love you” were the only words that came anywhere _close_ to what I meant. Scratching his back as he thrusted into me was a way of telling him that he was mine, and that I loved him, and I would never stop loving him. He knew all of that. So, even though words failed me during that speech, I knew that the one person there who knew the truth about my love for Aaron Hotchner was the only one who mattered.

“I made a promise to you once that I would love you unconditionally and I would always fight for you. It took you a long time to believe me when I said that your messes are my messes, but they are, and they always will be. No matter what, I will never stop loving you for that very reason. I _do_ love you, Aaron. I love you and I love Jack more than anything in the whole, wide world. You welcomed me into your life, into your home, and into your family. You let me love your son like he’s my own, and I know that I will spend the rest of my life thanking you for that opportunity. And I _want_ to spend my life thanking you. I want to spend every second by your side, running around the country while we do what we love, coming home to our son to hold him in our arms, and repeating that process. I love my life with you. I love _you_. No one can ever take that away from us. Ever.”

He gave me a look that asked if he could kiss me. I had to shake my head because we still had to get through the rest of the ceremony, and I wanted the very next kiss to be the first one that would start off the rest of our lives together. I wanted it to be _the_ kiss. I didn’t want to ever forget the next kiss. So, I glanced away from him, just to deter his urge.

The officiant looked to Hotch, “Please repeat after me. ‘I, Aaron Hotchner.’”

Hotch reached up to my face and brushed some of my hair back behind my ear. “I, Aaron Hotchner.” He continued to repeat every line, each one gaining in speed as his excitement took over. “Take you, Y/N Greenaway… To have and to hold… For better or for worse… In sickness and in health… To love, to cherish, to appreciate for as long as we both shall live.”

I had memorized the words before the officiant even turned to me. I knew that I had to be patient, and to repeat the same words at the same pace that Hotch had just done, but I wanted nothing more than to just race through it, say “I do” then kiss my husband for the first time. But patience was key. So, when the officiant started, I followed.

“I, Y/N Greenaway, take you, Aaron Hotchner, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. To love, to cherish, to appreciate for as long as we both shall live.”

It felt like a million pounds had been lifted off my chest by the time we got through it all. The long part was done, and now came the best part. The words “husband and wife” barely left the officiant’s lips before Hotch and I were jumping each other. He grabbed my hips roughly, pulling me against him as eagerly as possible, and he tilted his head down. I swung my arms around his neck, letting him lift me off the ground somewhat, and I pressed my lips to his for the first time as his wife. I smiled against him. Hotch giggled as the officiant finally said the cliché: “You may kiss the bride” a few seconds too late.

“Don’t let go yet,” Hotch begged before kissing me again.

I pulled away for air. “I’ll never let go.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I leaned into him. “I love you—” We kissed.

* * *

At the reception, I felt my head spinning. It was like an out of body experience. I was standing there beside Hotch, his arm wrapped around my waist, his hand on my hip; and we were talking to everyone who had come to the wedding and wanted to give us their personal congratulations. But I just couldn’t hear them. I was staring at Hotch, admiring how perfect he was. He was finally mine. I couldn’t believe that only a few hours ago, we were standing on the altar, sliding our wedding bands onto each other’s ring fingers. And now we were standing there… And I was just trying not to tip over. Even if I did waver, Hotch would have caught me. I trusted him with my life, and I understood that he could catch me if I ever fell—just like he had caught me when I tripped somewhat on my way down the aisle. He had me. I was all his, and he was all mine. We would always be there to protect each other.

“Oh, look, it’s my favorite taken agent,” someone cheered before tickling my sides. I laughed and gently sent my elbow back into his stomach. He playfully groaned after releasing me so that he could guard his stomach. “Man down! Man down!”

I turned and hit his arm. “Derek Morgan, you are acting like a child.”

“Only for you, sweetness.” He reached out to wing his arms around my shoulders, pulling me in for a tight hug that we both strained our strength for. “I’m so happy for you.”

Before I could respond, I felt someone tap my shoulder for their attention, and then they were quickly prying me off of Morgan. I giggled again as she pulled me into a hug that was even tighter than the last one I had just been trapped in. Emily laughed. “I told you they’d all see the truth,” she said giddily in my ear.

“Is he a Mr. Darcy contender or what?” I whispered back. We both laughed as we parted. I stared at her for a moment, admiring her smile. “I love you, Em. I don’t say it enough. But I do.”

She smiled and punched my arm lightly. “What’s got you being all sappy?”

“Mr. Darcy.”

“Ah. Yeah, I can see how that could happen.” She searched my face. “You look better than yesterday.”

“I feel better. It was just nerves.”

“Are we all congratulating the bride?” I heard a familiar voice ask behind me.

I smiled and turned. “Cody!”

I hugged him—but this wasn’t like with Morgan or Emily. No. Cody was the Director of the FBI, and therefore he was still my boss. Yes, Hotch and I were good friends with him, but there still had to be some level or respect and professionalism with him around while still outside of work. So, our hug was brief and polite. It didn’t mean much. But the looks on Morgan and Emily’s faces were priceless, honestly.

“They’re playing a slow dance for us,” Hotch told me. He grabbed my hand and started pulling me to the dance floor before I could finish talking with the Director and Emily, or even really get a chance to wave goodbye to them.

I giggled at how fast everything was happening. One second I was on the altar with him, then I was talking to Morgan and Emily, then the Director butted in, and now I was dancing with Aaron—my _husband_. The world was wild sometimes.

“You shouldn’t interrupt me next time.” I brushed his hair back out of his face then scratched my fingers down his five o’clock shadow.

He smirked and leaned in to whisper in my ear. “But you’re all mine now, and I don’t want you to forget it.”

“I’m all yours,” I whispered back, cupping my palm over his cheek. “Always.”

He pulled me close for a kiss until our chests were touching and he was almost towering over me, his hands on the small of my back the only thing keeping me from falling to the ground. I let my arms curl around the back of his neck. We giggled against each other’s lips as we ran out of breath, but he was adamant on still kissing me and proving his dominance to me as if no one were watching. Well, as if all of our friends and family at our wedding weren’t watching. That only made me laugh harder.

He nibbled on my jaw. “I love you, Y/N.”

I tangled my fingers in his hair, pulling at the strands lightly until he removed his lips from my skin in order to let me get a proper look at him. His eyes were dialed, a sign of love and lust. He was so predictable. But he had enough self-restraint to recognize that he couldn’t jump me then and there while everyone was watching as we swayed, laughed, and kissed. My mom was smiling and crying, thinking that we were the cutest, most innocent thing she had ever seen. If only she knew. My dad, on the other hand—as well as Rossi and Morgan—had a look that said: If you hurt Y/N, we’ll kill you ourselves. He would never hurt me, though. I knew that better than anyone else. Aaron Hotchner cherished me more than I could ever cherish him; and that sometimes frustrated me, but it ultimately made me feel infinitely and unconditionally loved.

Hotch rotated us as we continued to sway. I could now see the other side of the room where Emily, Reid, Garcia, JJ were all standing, pointing and gawking at us. I rolled my eyes at them. They were so embarrassing sometimes. But I loved them. Endlessly. There was nothing they could ever do or say that would make me love them any less. It just wasn’t possible. They were my family, and I was theirs, and that meant the whole world to me, considering the way my family fell apart. My parents split up for dumb reasons, and my sister was off the grid, becoming a free-spirit or some shit like that. Now, however, I had Jack and Hotch, my _real_ family. It was a nice consolation that I had the BAU in my corner, there to protect me and save me if need be, there to love me or scold me if I fucked up on a case. Even JJ, the one who doubted mine and Hotch’s relationship since the beginning, was a part of that family, and I still valued her opinion and her love. Like I said, I would always love them. If we fought, so be it. But, in the end, we were always going to be siblings, in a way.

“Do you ever wonder what the team would look like if Elle and Gideon were still there?” I asked Hotch quietly.

He cocked a brow at me. We had gone from practically sticking our tongues down each other’s throats to talking about random, old memories. I understood why it caught him off guard. I understood that it probably wasn’t the best time to ask; but it had been weighing on my mind as we swayed to the slow music.

“Sometimes,” Hotch agreed. “But I’m extremely grateful that we found Emily, and that Rossi came back.”

I nodded and rested my cheek against his chest. “I miss them.”

“I know.”

“Even though Gideon was a total asshole.”

Hotch chuckled. “Yeah. Even then.”

As the song came to a slow, steady end, Hotch and I parted from our embrace to kiss again, this time with a little less lust and a little more passion. And then Bohemian Rhapsody started playing. I laughed and pressed my forehead against his.

“I should probably let you get back to chatting with everyone,” he whispered.

I shook my head. “Just dance with me for a little longer.”

Hotch grinned, grabbing my hand, then stepped back from me before pulling me in and spinning me around until my back hit his chest. I was wrapped in a hug now. I rested my head against him, letting us sway and bounce to the music at a faster pace than we had been going with the last song; and since the slow dance was over, everyone else had wandered back onto the floor, too. So, Rossi wandered over. Jazz hands out, feet shuffling, his iconic Italian smirk on his face, he came to congratulate us.

“Bella!” he cheered, reaching to grab my face between his palms. “You two certainly know how to put on a show.” He kissed each of my cheeks roughly. “You, on the other hand,” he said, turning to Aaron, “need a few dancing lessons. I’m available on Thursday evenings." He patted Hotch’s shoulders.

“I know how to dance,” Hotch argued playfully.

“Clearly not.”

We all giggled. That was when I spotted a familiar face from across the room, which caught me off guard. He was sitting at the bar we had, ordering yet another drink from the bartender who hadn’t cut him off yet. I shook my head. Of course, he was late. And of course, he had to be getting drunk the first chance he got. I didn’t want to hold any biases against him, but he was making it really hard to keep defending him when he continued to pull shit like this and refuse to recognize that it was a problem. I just wished that he would let us help him.

I looked at Hotch and excused myself for a moment. He nodded an acknowledgement before turning back to his conversation and I left to walk across the room. “Taking advantage of the open bar?” I asked as I approached Sean.

He turned with a full glass in his hand. When he saw that it was me, he rolled his eyes slightly. “That’s what it’s here for, isn’t it?”

“Aaron’ll cut you off eventually.”

“I’ll be gone before then.”

“Will you even try to talk to him?”

“He doesn’t want me here. Why would I?” Sean sighed while setting his glass down. “Sorry. I know that it’s your day, and I have no right to stir up family drama.” He smiled. “I’m happy for you guys.” He started to walk away, but I caught his bicep.

I searched his eyes. “He really does love you, Sean. He’s just been hurt too many times.”

“Yeah, well… Him and everyone else in the world.” He pulled his arm away from me before striding off.

I sighed in defeat while shifting my weight on the balls of my feet. I just wanted them to make up. Ever since Haley’s death last year, Hotch had gone out of his way to make sure that none of us were affiliated with Sean. When he didn’t show up to the funeral, that was Hotch’s breaking point. He needed his brother there, yet Sean was too busy doing who knew what. Like, what could have been more important than that funeral? I didn’t understand. However, I still wanted Sean around because I knew that Hotch and Jack both needed him in their lives. Hotch, on the other hand, wasn’t having it. This was why. I should have known better. I should have known that Sean would still disappoint, no matter what. At least he showed up at all.

“Thank you,” someone whispered in my ear as they snaked their arms around my waist. I rested my head back against their shoulder. “You tried… That’s all you can do.”

I shook my head. “I thought he would just try to talk to you.”

Hotch ran his hands over the fabric of my dress, my stomach tensing up because it tickled a bit. “It’s okay.” He kissed my neck. “Hey.” He was trying to catch my attention, so I hummed a tone that asked him what was on his mind. “You wanna get out of here?”

“It’s our own wedding.”

“They won’t miss us anymore. All the important stuff is over.”

“It’ll be embarrassingly obvious.”

He hummed and smiled against my ear. “How about this…” He grabbed my hips roughly. “We’re leaving. Now.”

I gulped at the dominating, stern tone that practically vibrated throughout my entire body, sending a chill up my spine in response. Well, that was a preview as to what the next two weeks were going to be like for me. It made me smile. “Yes, Sir.”

Hotch nibbled at my earlobe light before whispering, “I love you.”

I turned my head so that I was looking at him while still resting against his shoulder. I kissed him. “I love you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I decided to give ya'll this chapter EARLY because my lovely friend on TikTok @ thomassgolfball posted a Greg Montgomery edit for me!


	40. ON VACATION

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: SMUT!! Cursing. Unprotected sex. Wrap it before you tap it, ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary sibs. Dom/sub relationship. Sir kink. Impregnation kink. Bondage (ropes). Nipple clamps. Choking (light breath play). Overstimulation. Degrading titles (slut, whore, etc.). The reader does go by they/them pronouns, however, Hotch refers to them as female when saying “good girl”. Aftercare. Finally. My boi is learning.
> 
> TIMELINE: Day after part thirty-nine.

When Hotch said he wanted to handle planning the honeymoon, I didn’t really argue. He said he wanted to make it special, that he wanted to treat me to something that I hadn’t done before, to get us as far from work as possibly in order to ensure that we wouldn’t be bothered. We told the team as we were saying goodbye to them over the phone while boarding the plane that even if the world was ending, they shouldn’t call us. They could handle it. Whatever it was, no matter what it was, they needed to solve it themselves. Absolutely zero reasons to call us about work.

Hotch didn’t tell me where we were going. He went to every length imaginable to make sure that I didn’t see the location on our tickets, on the monitors, or even when we were boarding. It was to be an absolute surprise. What also took be by surprise, besides the location a few hours later, was the fact that Hotch ushered me into a first-class window seat to make sure I was guarded from the rest of the plane. That was Hotch, though. He always gave me the window seat on the jet because it was a silent, _smooth_ way of showing his dominance and his protection over me. Besides, with how shitty I was at flying, I found it comforting to look out the window if I ever felt sick. I liked that he knew that. No, I loved that. And I loved him.

As we sat down, Hotch took my hand to catch me before the nerves about flying could settle in. Being on the jet was something I had gotten used to because it felt safe and familiar, and I trusted the pilots who flew us around the country; but there was something about being on a general population flight with dozens of other people, leaving our lives in the hands of strangers in the cockpit. It was unsettling. And not knowing where we were going or how long it was going to take to get there was somewhat irritating. Hotch knew it. He knew that unfamiliar territory was not my strong suit. So, he held my hand, and he kissed my knuckles, and he pulled me close to whisper in my ear that he loved me.

The seats themselves were amazing. Hotch showed me how they reclined all the way down into a 180 degree angle for sleeping, there was a partition between our seats in case we wanted privacy—like that was possible when we were headed for our honeymoon—and there was a pole that came out of the arm rest for the iPads the flight attendants were handing out since there weren’t any screens attached to the seats in front of us. I laughed when I saw the flight attendants. Hotch had done everything in his power to hide our destination from me, but the second I saw how they were dressed, I knew where we were going.

“Hawai’i?” I teased, leaning over the armrests in order to poke his dimple. “Really?”

He kept smiling. “I wanted to tell you when we landed.”

“I think you forgot just a few key details, though,” I said while grabbing the first-class dining menu from the pocket in front of me. It had the Hawaiian Airlines logo splayed across the front. “What was your plan for hiding this?”

“The plan was to make sure you didn’t touch it at all. I was going to order for you.”

“Don’t I get a say in what I order while on vacation?”

Hotch shook his head and leaned in towards me, too, bringing his lips to my ear. “No, baby girl. I make all the decisions.”

I gulped. “And what if I tried looking, anyhow? What was the plan then?”

“Oh, I’m taking note of everything,” he said plainly while leaning back in his seat. I cocked a brow. “You know, of every bratty thing you do. It’s accumulating.”

“I haven’t even done anything!” I defended.

“Mhm. Whatever you say.” He stole the menu from me and started looking through it. “Brat.”

I smiled and slumped back in my seat. “Whatever you say, Sir.”

He reached over the arm rests in order to put a hand on my thigh. He squeezed. “I love you.”

I put my hand over his. “I love you, too.”

* * *

Several hours later, we landed in Maui. Hotch and I had watched a few movies on the flight, and I even managed to sleep a bit once I wasn’t nervous about the flight anymore. Hotch didn’t let go of me the entire time. I knew that he was probably thinking that if he did, I’d freak out and get upset, so he did everything he could to make sure that wouldn’t happen. And then we got off the plane, his hold on me becoming more possessive than protective now. I smirked to myself. Was this how it would be now? Would he always be like this with me, trying to show everyone that I was his, and no one would change that. I really loved the idea.

When we got our rental car, Hotch loaded up our bags, and we started driving to the hotel. Only, it wasn’t a hotel. We passed all of the fancy hotels that were ridiculously overpriced, and then we passed the cheaper hotels that were more ideal to stay in for two long weeks, and when we hit residential homes, I started getting concerned. Why weren’t we staying back at a resort? Why weren’t we with the other stupid tourists? And then it all started to make sense when we turned down a road that marked the Lokelani Condominiums. My jaw dropped.

“Aaron, what did you do?” I asked, staring at the rows of condos we passed until we found the building marked as the check in center.

“Stay here,” he said, parking, then unbuckled his seatbelt before heading inside.

A few minutes passed. I was sitting in the car, enjoying the air conditioning as an escape from the nearly unbearable heat, my eyes trained on the window as I watched Hotch talk to the concierge, getting us checked into our… condo? Was that what this was? He really couldn’t just get us a hotel room? Not that I was complaining, of course. The privacy and flamboyancy were actually kind of nice. However, all of that extra privacy just meant that the next two weeks were going to be torture for me, knowing that Hotch was already struggling to keep his hands to himself.

When Hotch returned to the car, he had the keys to the condo he had rented out and directions to get there. I propped my elbow on the armrest between us and rested my chin on my knuckles. I stared at him with a grin. I fucking loved him more than anything in the whole wide world. I didn’t need him to spend all of this money, to go above and beyond for me just to prove that. All I needed was him. And while staring at him as he stretched his arm over the back of my car seat so that he could look over his shoulder as he pulled out of the parking lot, I realized that we could have been anywhere in the world, and I would have been content. But we were in _Maui_. He had done all of this for me… I fucking loved him… So fucking much.

He faced forward in his seat, his eyes catching a glance at the way I was smirking up at him. “What?” he asked, laughing. I shook my head. “Do I have something on my cheek?” He wiped his palm over his face. I shook my head again. “Baby, what?”

“Nothing.”

He narrowed his eyes while staring at the road. “Baby girl…” he growled under his breath. His dominant tone should have made me obey him, but it didn’t. All it did was make me smirk even more, but this time with a hint of deviousness. He suddenly grabbed my chin roughly. “Are you really going to be like this for the next two weeks?”

“Maybe.”

He tightened his grip on me, making me whimper. “You know, we actually have things that we should do while we’re here.”

“Yeah, but you could just… fuck me all day, Sir.”

He let out a shuddered breath. “Not while you’re acting like a brat.” We parked in front of our condo, and the second the car was off, Hotch leaned over and kissed me hard, his grip still tight on my jaw. I moaned into his mouth. “Stay here,” he mumbled against my lips. I tried leaning into him as he pulled away, but he didn’t let me succeed. He let me just fall limp against the armrest.

Hotch opened the trunk of the rental car and started pulling our luggage out so that he could roll it into the condo on his own. I furrowed my brows in my confusion. Why did he want me to wait in the car instead of helping him? I didn’t put the pieces together until I saw him lock the door to the condo behind him once all of our bags were safe inside, then returned to the car and buckled himself in. We weren’t going immediately to the bedroom. Touché. He probably knew as well as I did that if we went there, we weren’t leaving. I slumped in my seat.

“Don’t pout,” he said dominantly.

“But—”

“No.”

I slumped more. “Yes, Sir…”

He grinned and put a hand on my thigh as we started driving on the highway. “Good girl.” He squeezed, making me tense up.

* * *

We had spent the afternoon driving to a fish restaurant on the beach; but I honestly didn’t understand why I couldn’t even consider the idea of eating fish while we were there. I didn’t know what it was, but the thought was starting to make me sick. So, I opted to eat something else. Hotch didn’t seem to notice.

After we ate, we walked down to the beach to put our feet in the water. I teased Hotch by kicking some of it onto his rolled-up pants, to which he leaned down and started splashing me back. I giggled and tried running away. Yet, he managed to catch up to me and capture me in his arms. I genuinely thought we were going to fall in the water with the way I was kicking in protest and he was laughing so hard.

When we got back to the condo, Hotch and I finally decided to unpack our bags. Firstly, though, I wanted to get a look at the place he had rented out for us. There was a hallway by the front door where we could leave our shoes—and the person who had rented their condo out for us had even left leis for us. I chuckled at the cliché. Further in, we entered the kitchen which was full with silverware, plates, bowls, cups, a dishwasher, and empty fridge—which Hotch promised we would fill tomorrow when we would get a chance to go to the grocery store. Past the counter where the sink was, I could see the tiny dining room with a table and four chairs. Then there was a floor to ceiling window with a glass door so that we could step out onto the patio. I smiled at Hotch.

“Just wait.”

He grabbed my hand and giddily started leading me towards the bedroom. When we stumbled in, I stopped. There was the California King sized bed with a canopy surrounding it. The comforter was an ocean blue color, of course, but the canopy beams were black, and the fabric hanging from it was white.

My eyes wandered to the view that Hotch was admiring to my right. There were more floor to ceiling windows, with another glass door, but now we had a clear view of the beach and the water, not just the patio. I gawked.

“Aaron.”

“I had to,” he defended quickly. “I saw it, and I knew I had to.”

I approached him and slid my arms around his torso, resting my palms against his abs, leaning my cheek against his back. “I love you.” I gave him a Superman hug.

We started with unpacking our bags. Hotch was on the left side of the bed, and I was on the right, our bags between us. Every time I wandered over to the dressed to put some clothes away, I could feel the way Hotch’s eyes were glued on me; and whenever I went to pass him to get into the bathroom to put toiletries away, he would squeeze or spank my ass, or pull me in for a desperate, lustful kiss. I had to keep pushing him away. He kept getting too handsy, and it was forcing me to heat up and flush at the feeling. There were two weeks ahead of us for him to ruin me, I didn’t need him to completely break me on the first day, though I knew he wanted to.

By the time I was pulling out a condensed version of our block box, Hotch was already pulling me onto the bed. He had me pinned by straddling my waist to ensure that I couldn’t sit up or roll away. He started going through everything I brought. Nipple clamps, a vibrator, a dildo, a pair of handcuffs, and a stack of ropes. Yeah, TSA probably had fun with that one.

“You brought all of my favorites?” he asked.

“You sound surprised.”

“No,” he shook his head, “just proud and madly in love with you.” He leaned down to kiss me. “C’mere,” he took my hand and helped me sit up as he shimmied off of me. As he stood, I watched him inspect the canopy that supported the bed. There was a horizontal overhead bar at the end of the bed, just where Hotch was standing, so he reached up to test how sturdy it was by pulling on it. The bed shook somewhat, but it wouldn’t break. He smirked. “Stand up.” I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. “Be a good girl and don’t move. Understand?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sir.”

He kissed my jaw before nibbling lightly on my neck, attempting to leave a hickey there. His hands traveled, slowly working their way down to the hem of my shirt. He kissed the other side of my neck when he scrunched up the fabric. I caught the hint. Throwing my head back to give his lips clearer access to my skin, I also lifted my arms over my head so that he could pull my shirt over my head. He did so slowly. Taking a moment to massage my breasts lightly, Hotch pinched my nipples, making me jump slightly. It stung.

“Sensitive today?” he teased.

“Yes, Sir.”

“Don’t move.” He pulled his hands away from me, forgetting about his task of ridding me of my clothes so that he could wander over to the windows to my left and close the drapes. Our view of the beach and the ocean was great and all, but the problem was that anyone could see us, too, if they happened to look over at our condo. That wasn’t exactly ideal. “Good girl,” he complimented when he saw that I hadn’t budged. When he returned to the bed, he grabbed a length of rope and unraveled it, then he threw it over his shoulder in order to free up his hands. He started taking my shirt off again, this time as fast as he could. “Fuck,” he whispered under his breath. “You’re so beautiful, baby girl.” I blushed. “Wrists together.” I did so. Hotch reached up and tied my wrists together using the rope he had over his shoulder, and after, he used the extra length to tie me to the canopy bar overhead. “Pull.”

I tested the rope and the bar by gently tugging, only to find that he had made it tighter than I had anticipated, and the give of the bar was practically none. My heart sped up in my chest. This wasn’t good. There was hardly any room for me to wiggle—actually, there was no room at all. Fuck.

Hotch moved his attention down to my pants. He started pulling them down to my ankles. “Left foot.” He held my ankle to help me step out of the pant leg. “Right.” He helped me out of the other one.

When I was standing in only my panties, Hotch stood upright and stared at me for the shortest moment before leaning to grab the nipple clamps from the bed. I watched as he pinched on side of the chain clamps open, and he held my left nipple between his index finger and thumb, making sure that it was hard enough to give him space to attach the clamp. I sucked in a breath as I anticipated the pain. When Hotch released the tension of the clamp, I felt the sting of the clamps pinch run through my whole body. It hurt more than usual. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I could just feel the way the pain lingered longer and hit me a little harder. Hotch didn’t even wait to move onto the second one, completing the task the same way. The pain was just as bad as the first one. It must have just been the fact that it had been so long since we last used them that I just wasn’t used to the feeling.

Hotch searched my face. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sir.”

He reached up and slid his hand around my neck. “Good.” He kissed me deeply, his tongue finding its way into my mouth so that he could claim immediate dominance. And then he pulled away once he knew that I was entirely in sub space.

With his hand still wrapped around my neck, Hotch let his free hand wander down my body. He admired every inch of me as slowly as he could. My breasts, my arms, my waist, my hips, even my thighs. His fingers were moving at a snail-like pace with a pressure that was hardly there. I melted slightly. I knew that he was doing it for the sake of teasing me, yes, but also because he was drinking in every inch of me that was now _officially_ his. His brown eyes sparkled with lust for what was going to come… but beyond that, I saw something different that I had never noticed before. True, unconditional love. I knew he loved me. He wouldn’t have married me if he didn’t love me and want all of me to be his; but it was then, as his grip on my neck tightened, that I saw a glint in his eyes that said: “You’re _all mine,_ and I don’t want either of us to forget that.”

And then his fingers stopped just at my panty line. My breath hitched. Hotch smirked at me and leaned in to leave a hickey on my neck. I pulled at the rope holding my arms up, desperate to touch him. I wanted nothing more than to just hold him close, to run my fingers through his hair, to pull at the strands as he nibbled on my skin lightly. But I couldn’t. He had tied me tight enough that I could hardly bend my elbows. Asshole.

“Sir, please,” I croaked, throwing my head back as he moved to leave a hickey on the other side of my neck.

Hotch didn’t listen to my plea. All he did was catch me off guard by wrapping his index finger around the chain hanging between my breasts, and he tugged. I whimpered and arched my back with the pull to make it less painful. He dropped the chain suddenly. It swung against my chest, making the clamps sway, which in turn kept tugging at my sensitive nipples. I bit my lip to hold back a groan. His hand returned to my panty line because he knew that I had learned my lesson about speaking out of turn. But he didn’t pull my underwear down yet. To my surprise and frustration, he let his fingers dance over the hem for a little bit. He was doing it to let my anticipation build, knowing that it would only make me more desperate for him. And it was. It was fucking working, and I hated him for it.

Finally, he fisted the fabric of my panties in his palm until it was taught against my hip, and he pulled as hard as he could. I yelped as the lace material ripped apart. Hotch kissed my collarbone in order to distract me. I bought that pair just for this honeymoon, and now they were ruined. I knew that once this was over, I was going to make him pay for the replacement pair. Which, honestly, he wouldn’t mind, because it meant he got to see me trying on a few pairs until he found one that he wanted to rip off me again. It was going to be a never-ending cycle. Great.

Within an instant after Hotch tore my underwear off, his index and middle fingers found my clit. He started rubbing hard and quick figure eights that made my knees weak again. I wanted to beg for more, but I bit my tongue because I didn’t want to give him a reason to stop touching me just so he could pull at the chain again.

“Does that feel good, baby girl?” he whispered seductively into my ear. I nodded. “You may speak,” he growled, tightening his grasp on my neck to the point I actually felt my breath let up slightly.

“Yes, Sir,” I croaked while nodding eagerly. “It feels so good, Sir.”

Hotch let go of my neck entirely and I gasped for air. He shushed me quietly and brushed my hair out of my face. “I want you to cum for me.”

I let my head fall forward against his shoulder. The knot in my stomach had only _just_ started building, and yet his words suddenly made my desperation to cum quicken. His fingers didn’t let up. He went faster to encourage me to cum for him. I bit down on his shirt slightly to stop myself from crying out and begging for mercy. He cooed me quietly still as he held me close despite how rough his fingers were with me. The knot in my stomach kept building and building as my orgasm approached. Hotch could sense it with how I was pulling against the rope and biting on his shirt as hard as I could.

“Do it,” he commanded. “Cum.”

I moaned, cried, and whimpered into his shoulder as I tipped over the edge. Hotch’s fingers kept going. My walls clenched around nothing, my clit throbbed, my nipples tingled between the clamps, and my thighs shivered. Hotch wrapped one of his long, muscular arms around my waist to hold me up. I exhaled deeply against him as my peak faded and I came down from my high.

Hotch kissed my temple lightly. “Good girl.” He removed his fingers from hovering over my sensitive clit, and he stepped back to take a look at the mess he made of me. Without him there to hold me, my knees gave out, and I swung lightly from the canopy railing over my head. “Look at you, baby… You look so good broken.” He reached out to hold my chin between his thumb and index finger. He made me look at him. “My good girl… My love… My wife…” He stepped towards me again so that he could kiss me gingerly. “You know that I love you, right?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sir. I love you, too.”

He wiped his thumb over my bottom lip. “Good. Because I’m going to fuck you like I don’t.”

He grabbed my hips to pull me to my feet. He kissed me again, this time with more force; then, before I could kiss him back, he turned me around roughly. I stumbled in place to get my feet to face the bed. My arms were twisted now into an X over my head. My biceps were squeezing my ears because I didn’t have enough slack to pull my arms down just a smidge. Hotch’s hands grabbed onto my thighs and he started kneading them like they were dough in his palms. The touch set me on fire again. I felt the need for him return, and my clit started to throb with anticipation once more.

“Spread your legs,” he commanded, even though he did it for me.

When his hands left my thighs, I could hear his clothes scrunching up and ruffling around, which meant that he was finally ridding himself of everything. I quietly whined at the thought of not being able to watch him as he fucked me, and the prospect of not getting to hold his biceps as they flexed with every thrust. So, I arched my ass back to show my eagerness for his touch, which only earned me a light smack— something he didn’t normally do, but I wasn’t opposed.

Next thing I knew, Hotch was pressed against my back, his left hand snaking around my front to reach up and grab ahold of my neck again. I leaned against him, feeling how hard he was between my thighs. His abs tensed against my back, his biceps flexed against my sides, and his cock twitched in response to being lined up with my wet entrance. We both let out a relieved sigh at the feeling. I was dripping for him, and he was so hard and ready for me. My fingers wrapped around the length of rope holding me up as I braced myself for what was about to come—and it was a good thing I did, because Hotch squeezed my neck in one hand and dug his nails into my hip with the other hand as he roughly thrust into me. I groaned loudly. He filled me with every inch he had to offer, and with the force he gave it to me, I thought I could break again.

“Fuck,” he whispered into my hair. “So wet for me, baby.”

Using his hand on my hip, Hotch started moving me back and forth on his length while also thrusting in and out of me at an ungodly pace. A string of curse words fell from my lips. He squeezed my neck harder, making me throw my head back against his shoulder. He kept fucking me as hard and fast as he could. The chain between my breasts bounced, and my nipples ached in the best way possible.

“Sir!” I shouted as he moved his hand from my hip to my clit.

Every inch of him pulled out of me, making me feel empty again. He was so thick that he stretched my walls, and his length made my knees weak for him every time; but without him in me, I felt like I was missing a piece of myself. He always fit inside of me so well… so snug… so tight… But he didn’t let me miss him for too long. Just as his tip teased my entrance, he slammed back into me once more. I cried out and struggled against the rope. I could feel him smirking behind me as his fingers worked faster on my clit.

I couldn’t even moan anymore. All I could muster were screams of pleasure or weak whimpers when my lungs started hurting. There was no in between. Hotch’s thrusts were so rough and unpredictable, it made me cry out compared to moaning his name, like I normally would. He promised that he would fuck me like he hated me, and he wasn’t holding back. I loved it. I loved that despite how rough he was with me, and no matter how hard he tried to hate fuck me, I knew that he loved me, and he was doing all of this to prove that I was _his_ , and I was going to be his for the rest of our lives. That thought alone nearly made me cum. But I wanted to hold on for him. I wanted to cum with him, at the same time, to share that moment as he filled me with his cum as I clenched around him until I couldn’t breathe. That was the dream. This was everything I wanted since meeting him. I was on cloud nine.

“Such a slut for me,” he groaned into my ear. I nodded eagerly. “Always so wet and desperate for me like a good, obedient whore.” He nibbled on my shoulder. “Fuck,” he breathed out. “Fuck—” That time it was more of a needy whine than a dominant moan. “I’m gonna cum, baby.” I moaned and bucked my hips back against him to help encourage his orgasm. “I’m gonna fill you.”

“Please, Sir. Please—Make me yours—”

“Fuck, fuck—Shit—” His tell was always letting out a string of curses. “Cum on my cock—” He let out a throaty groan as he came, his hips stilling, his cock twitching inside of me, but his fingers didn’t stop moving against my clit, so I tipped over the edge. I started clenching around him. “Shit!” He cried quietly at the extra stimulation. Almost as if he were punishing me for squeezing his sensitive length, his fingers didn’t relent on my clit.

“Sir,” I whined, my head falling forward. “It’s too much—” I was so sensitive between my aching nipples, my throbbing clit, and my stretched walls. “Sir…” He didn’t stop until after he slowly thrusted into me one last time, ensuring that his cum was as deep in me as possible, then he pulled out. His fingers left me. “Thank you, Sir. Thank you.” We were both panting, but I was entirely breathless. “Thank… Thank you…”

“Shhh,” he cooed, spinning me around. “You’re welcome, baby girl.”

“I’m worn,” I told him. I lifted my head to see that his forehead and chest was dripping sweat. His dark hair was pressed down instead of flowing free. His entire body was still tensed up, his abs and biceps flexing, his erection slowly disappearing. “Hands.”

“Okay.” He reached up and started untying my wrists.

“I might fall,” I warned, feeling the way my legs were shaking uncontrollably in response to my fading orgasms. He chuckled. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny.” He finished freeing my hands, and he managed to catch my waist before I could collapse onto the ground. He helped me lay down on the bed. “I have to take off the clamps.”

“I’m still really sensitive.”

“You okay?” he asked me quietly. I nodded. “Just hold onto me.” I squeezed his shoulders as he leaned down so that his face was close to my breasts. “Breathe…” he whispered, pinching the end of the left clamp, releasing it from around my nipple. The stinging pain shot through my whole body, making my back arch and a moan leave my lips. Hotch immediately wrapped his mouth around the sore bud and gently sucked and licked to replace the pain with pleasure. As I calmed down, my body relaxed. I released his shoulders. “Good girl…” He sat up somewhat. “You okay?” I nodded again. He ran his thumb over the tip of my nipple, making me squirm. He chuckled. “Sorry. Had to.” I hit his shoulder playfully. “Breathe again, baby girl,” he warned as he put his fingers on the other clamp. “Ready—” He pinched to pull it off.

“Shit!” I whined, wiggling around on the bed. Hotch immediately put his mouth on my nipple again. “Fuck, baby…”

When I relaxed, Hotch released it with a _pop_ , and he moved to kiss my lips. “I’m sorry, baby,” he apologized quietly.

I shook my head and ran my fingers through his hair. “Don’t be. It was good… I’m just really sensitive today, I don’t know why.”

He pecked my lips with a quick, yet still loving kiss. “Let me grab a towel.” He scrambled to his feet and hurried to the bathroom.

I sighed away my exhaustion as I stared up at the ceiling. Holy shit. It was suddenly hitting me like a train that this was going to be the rest of my life, and… I smiled… I was so happy. My life was going to be spent with the man I loved more than anything else in the whole, wide world. He was going to look into my eyes, tell me he loved me every single day. He was going to hold me in his arms to comfort me every second I needed it. He was going to fuck me until I was screaming for him _every time_. And that made me the happiest person to have ever lived.

“Maybe I’ll just leave you like this, actually,” Hotch teased from the doorway. I craned my neck up to see him leaning against the wall, a small green towel dangling in front of his nude body. He was staring at my entrance, watching how his cum slowly leaked out of me. I smiled. “Can I say something cliché?” I nodded. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life than I am now.”

“Can I say something cliché, too?” I asked, biting my lip. He nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”

Hotch’s smile widened as he took a few large steps to jump back onto the bed with me. I yelped through a laugh. “I love you…” He attacked my neck with a thousand kisses. “I love you…” He shifted around on the bed so that he could wipe the towel down my sweaty body ever so slowly. “My wife…”

“My husband…” I found his mouth and eagerly pressed my tongue inside. Hotch let me, even moaning slightly in response. When the towel passed over my chest, I moaned shortly after him. My head fell back against the mattress. I was so tired from what we had just done, I was content with just lying there as he cleaned me up.

“Say it again,” he begged.

I tangled my fingers in the long strands of his black hair as he laid a gentle kiss just above my belly button. “My husband…” I whispered into the air. The ambience changed as I said it. The red lust of the room slowly turned into a blue that blanketed us in peace, tranquility, and eternal love for one another. “My husband.”

“Again.”

“My husband,” I said more desperately just as the towel passed between my legs to clean up the mess he made. “ _Mine_.” A slight, almost submissive whimper left his throat. I smiled and tugged on his hair. “Mine.”

He threw the towel to the side once I was cleaned up. “Mine,” he echoed. “Mine…” He kissed the valley between my breasts.

“Mine.”

Aaron Hotchner was all mine. He was the love of my life, my husband, the best father to our son, Jack, and he was _mine_. I knew that getting married to him would make me happy, yet somehow, I wasn’t entirely prepared for being so happy I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to move, speak, or think. All I could do was land on the fact that Aaron Hotchner was mine. Even better, I was his. Admitting that to myself made my heart swell in my chest.

“I love you, Aaron Hotchner,” I whispered to him as his face hovered over mine.

“I love you, Y/N Hotchner.”


	41. NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Cursing. Kidnapping. Mentions of death, torture, sexual assault, panic attack, PTSD-- everything Criminal Minds. Talk of sex, BDSM, Dom/sub relationship, etc.
> 
> TIMELINE: Week and a half after part forty.

Hotch and I had just gotten back from a day out in town and on the beach. I was exhausted, and, frankly, I wasn’t feeling well, so we decided to head back to the condo early so that I could lay down for a bit. As I went into our condo, Hotch went to the concierge to talk to them about something. I didn’t hesitate to hurry past the kitchen, storm through the bedroom, and head straight into the bathroom. I sighed when the door locked behind me. Hotch had been asking a million reasons in the car, and I was running out of excuses. If he would’ve looked into the CVS bag in my hand… There wasn’t much time to ponder everything _and_ do this before Hotch would get back. So, I started racing to get it over with.

I reached into the brown paper bag, searching around the bottle of TUMS and Motrin I had to buy to make sure Hotch didn’t get suspicious. And then I found it. I sighed with relief as I pulled the small box out and let the bag fall to the ground. Eyeing the bathroom door, as if he would kick it down at any minute for some reason, I pulled the test from the small box. I stared at it for a second. It felt like a damn movie moment. You know, when the camera looks down on the test, a slow zoom in shot, and then there’s an upward angle shot of the woman’s reaction. I hadn’t even taken the fucking test yet, and I already felt like I was that woman.

“Fuck it,” I whispered, sitting down to take the test according to the instructions.

When I was done, I set the test down on the counter as I washed my hands. I only had _maybe_ a few more minutes before Hotch would get back. I prayed that he wouldn’t return before I knew the results. Either way it could go, I was going to be relieved. Hotch and I always talked about this, and we made a decision after New York that we were ready. So, if it were positive, I knew that we were going to be the best parents ever. I mean… Jack was a trial run for me, I supposed, and Hotch was awesome with him. We could do this. And if it were negative, Hotch never had to know that I was concerned, and we’d actually get to sit down and talk about this again. I didn’t want this to be out of the blue for him. I didn’t want it to smack him in the face just after we got married. It hadn’t even been nine days since the wedding. He could still bail out of all of this if he wanted to. If he found out that I were pregnant and he suddenly realized that he wasn’t actually ready to be with me and start to a family with me, then he could go. That was what I was terrified of.

The cold water suddenly knocked me out of my train of thought. I turned off the faucet and looked down at the test. My heart sank in my chest. Well, there it was. There was the answer. Hotch couldn’t know. At least not yet.

“Baby?!” I heard Hotch call from the front door.

I panicked and hid the test and box under the trashcan liner in the trash bin next to the toilet. Hotch’s footsteps shook the condo slightly as he neared the bedroom. To make sure he wouldn’t think that anything was wrong, I flushed the toilet again so that he could hear it, I turned the sink on for a moment to make it sound like I was washing my hands, and then I unlocked the door. Hotch was standing just outside. I giggled nervously as we ran into each other.

“You okay?” he asked worriedly.

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m still just not feeling well.”

He put his head up on my forehead to feel for a temperature. I didn’t feel warm, of course, so he didn’t seem that worried. “It might just be a stomach bug.”

I nodded, though his words made me die inside slightly. “Yeah, a stomach bug.”

“Why don’t you lay down for a bit, and I’ll go to the restaurant down the path to pick up dinner?” he offered quietly. I leaned forward, pressing my face into his chest. He draped his arms over my shoulders to hug me lightly, and he kissed the top of my head. “It’s just down the path, I’ll be back before you know it.”

When we first got to the condo, we found a cute, little beach side restaurant for tourists. They had fish, burgers, chicken fingers, cocktails, everything you would expect from a place where its target audience was families on vacation. We liked it because it was just down the path behind our condo, and we could take food to go to either bring up to the condo or to take down to the water to eat dinner while watching the sunset. It was easy and it was close, and since I “wasn’t feeling well”, I could just get fries off the kids menu or something. It was a good idea. It was also a good excuse to get Hotch out of my hair for a little while longer while I considered what to do with the test. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t know that I took it. He’d only get mad if he found out that I took it and didn’t tell him.

So, I told him that getting dinner from there was a good idea, and that I’d just take something light. He asked if I wanted a soda to help settle my stomach, and I told him I’d just take a water. He mentally took note of everything I wanted as he separated himself from out hug. I looked up at him with a forced smile. He stared at me, trying to get a read n what was going on, but with how I was dodging it all by telling him that I was just feeling sick, he couldn’t see past the ruse. He was good at profiling, and he had proven that he knew how to profile me, but I wasn’t going to let him get this one so easy.

“Okay,” he finally gave in, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I nodded. “I love you.”

He kissed my forehead. “I love you, too.”

He started pulling away from me, and suddenly I started feeling guilty. I wanted to wait until he would come back to tell him, but… We promised that we would never keep secrets from each other. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t keep to that promise? I always gave Hotch shit for not being honest with me at all times, so I should’ve told him as soon as I found out—especially with something like this. He had every right to know. I couldn’t be a hypocrite when it came to the promise we made, even more so since we shared our vows a week and a half ago. I owed this to him.

“Wait, Aaron—” I stepped to grab his hand. He stopped in his tracks and looked over his shoulder. “We have to talk about something.”

He looked at me and smiled slightly. “Okay. We can. Just lay down for a bit first, alright?” He squeezed my hand and started walking away. “We’ll talk while we eat.”

I didn’t reach out for him this time. He had a point that we could wait just a few more minutes to discuss it, even though he had no clue what it was that I wanted to discuss with him. At least now he knew that I wasn’t keeping it from him, and that I was eager to tell him the truth. Honestly, as terrified as I was, I still wanted to tell him. I originally thought I wanted to wait to admit it because I was fearful that he’d be scared off, but as he started walking away from me, I felt a desperate urge to tell him while he held me in his arms. He was going to be happy. I knew that now. He was the one who brought it up again in New York. He was the one who admitted he wanted to have kids with me. When I was finally going to get to tell him, I could already predict that he was going to scoop me into his arms, kiss me a thousand times, whisper to me how much he loved me, and we were going to happy. It was all going to be okay. So, I let him go.

We exchanged one last glance as he closed the sliding glass door behind him. I watched for a few extra moments as he started walking down the path towards the beach. Suddenly, my head started aching. I sighed and went to grab the CVS bag from the bathroom. Well, at least I was smart enough to buy some Motrin while I was there.

I stood at the bathroom counter as I twisted off the top of the bottle, turned it on its side in my hands, and started shaking it slightly to sift out one pill. I sighed again as I headed to the kitchen to grab a glass from one of the cupboards. I turned to the sink and started filling the glass up. That was when I felt something odd touch my back. I turned off the sink and spun around on my heels, expecting to see Hotch there as if he had come back for his wallet or something, but what I found instead terrified me.

I set my glass down on the counter and tried dashing for the bedroom where my gun was, but the man who was standing right in front of me grabbed me and pinned me against the counter before I could even take a step. I groaned and tried to kick his balls, but he dodged. That was when I saw another man approach us from the bedroom. I looked over to see that the man holding me had come through the front door of the condo, and the man approaching us came from the unlocked patio door that Hotch left through. I cursed myself for not locking it behind him.

I tried kicking the man again while trashing in his hold, but he lifted his gun and pressed the front of it to my temple. I froze in place. My eyes widened in horror and my body went numb. Finally, without me thrashing around, I could stop long enough to get a look at the men and the situation I was in. Both of the men in the condo with me were wearing black ballistic masks, black hoodies, black cargo pants, black boots—black everything. At first glance, I could tell that they had come prepared. Unfortunately for me, this didn’t seem like a wrong time, wrong place scenario. These men knew how and when to enter the condo, and they knew exactly how to detain me. The first man had come in, snuck up on me, grabbed me, and pinned me to make sure I couldn’t fight back. The second Unsub was blocking my way to the bedroom, so even if I managed to get out of the first man’s hold, I wasn’t going to get a chance to grab my gun.

I cringed at the thought and tried fighting again. The man holding me slapped me to get me to stop moving. “Stop fucking moving,” he demanded gruffly.

As my cheek burned from the hit, I looked back up at him. His eyes were a light blue, but that was all I could see. With his hood pulled up and black leather gloves covering his hands, I couldn’t decipher anything else about him.

“Turn around,” he ordered me. He grabbed my biceps and spun me around so that I was facing the sink again. One of his arms reached out past my head and he pointed at the window past the dining room. “See your husband down on the beach?” I followed where his finger was pointing to see Hotch standing at the restaurant, looking down at his phone as he waited for our food. I shivered. “See the man standing behind him?” My gaze shifted a few inches to the man he was referring to. He wasn’t wearing the same black ensemble the two Unsubs with me were wearing, but he certainly looked out of place with his long pants, boots, and t-shirt. Most people down there were wearing bathing suits and sandals— Hotch included.

“Give us a wave, Gene,” the second Unsub said. I looked over at him quickly. He was talking into a burner phone.

“Look,” the first Unsub said, grabbing my cheeks roughly to turn my face back towards the window. My heart sank in my chest. The man standing just behind Hotch looked up at us and gave a small wave. When he was done, the Unsub let go of my face. “If you try to scream or run, we’ll tell Gene to kill your husband.”

If they gave that kind of order, there were nearly twenty different witnesses there to identify Gene. But what good would that be to me by then? If I did anything these guys didn’t like, I would lose Hotch forever. It wouldn’t matter if they were caught or not… Without Hotch, I… And then I thought about the baby. They could kill Hotch, but they still wouldn’t let me go. If I tried anything, they could hurt me and my baby, and I couldn’t do that… I… My options were limited before, but now there was nothing I could do but see how this would all play out. My best chance was getting a profile on these guys by playing their game while hoping that Hotch could help me before they could kill me—or if Hotch couldn’t help me before then, hopefully I could find a way out. I had been prepared for something like this. We learned a thousand different ways at the Academy to get out of hostage situations. If I just kept my cool, I’d be fine. Our baby would be fine. That was all that mattered now.

So, I gave in.

* * *

With every milestone hour of kidnappings that passed, I was getting progressively more worried. It started with the first hour, then eight hours, ten hours, twelve, twenty-four… When they didn’t kill me at twenty-four hours, I realized that there was something bigger at play. There was a reason they weren’t killing me. There was a reason that they hadn’t even laid a hand on me since tying me to that damn wooden chair in the middle of the room.

When they first took me, they threw me into the trunk of their car with a bag over my head, nothing else. So. Amateurs. At first, I tried fiddling with the trunk to get out. But then I stopped. I realized that even if I got it open, with how fast we were going, if I tried to roll out, I’d probably just end up killing myself and the baby. Then I considered just getting the attention of the car behind me, but if the men who took me found out I wasn’t playing by their rules, they were going to kill Hotch. So, I waited. I waited to see if there was a better opportunity at the second location they were taking me to.

The bag was still over my head as we parked and they pulled me out of the car. Since they didn’t exactly give me time to put on shoes before leading me out of the condo, I could feel the wet dirt beneath my feet. It was cold and raining, and I could hear animals all around, and the flutter of leaves in tall trees surrounding us. We were in the jungle, that much I knew. Where or how far, I didn’t know. We had been driving for long, none of their turns or paths made sense. And then we stepped into a wooden cabin. They sat me on a chair and started tying me to it.

While silence hung in the air and all I could see was darkness, I took a moment to reflect on everything. Victimology, the crime scene, the Unsubs’ behavior—everything. So two of them came into the condo first. One behind me, another waiting to appear in the bedroom to my left. They planned that they would catch me off guard, block off all of my exits, then use Hotch as extra leverage. That proved that they _definitely_ knew who we were. Planning for Hotch’s exit and predictable move to head down to the restaurant took planning. They had likely been watching us for days. They wanted to know when the perfect time to strike was, and they wanted to know the best way to go about it. Well, they certainly succeeded.

Before leaving, they made me dump the glass of water I just poured and put it back in the cupboard. Next, they had me take off my wedding ring. I was reluctant to do so, and tried to tell them that there were more valuable things in the condo for them to steal, but they were adamant. As I continued to refuse, the first Unsub cocked his gun against my head as a warning. I had no choice but to take off my ring, then place it on the counter, like they asked. I didn’t understand that until later. They made me grab my purse, and while we were in the car, I could hear that they were buying a plane ticket on my phone using my account. They were trying to make it look like I ran. They thought that they could make this all disappear if they just convinced Hotch that I left him. But I would never have done that. Not after just getting married… Not after just finding out that we… Shit. He didn’t know.

Finally, when they had me tied down, they took off the bag over my head, and I could get a good look at the three of them. None of them were wearing masks now. That was the main reason for my concern of not making it past twenty-four hours. Usually, when Unsubs revealed their identities to their victims, it meant that they were going to kill them. That was why I was so surprised when I made it through the second day, too, and started getting worried that something larger was at play. But I was getting ahead of myself and the profile I was building.

They tore the bag off my head and stared at me. I looked around the cabin to see that it was being used as a storage space of some kind because there were plastic and carboard boxes everywhere but where I was sitting and where they were standing. It was close quarters, sure, but there was still space for them to talk somewhat privately in the corner. They didn’t take the opportunity, though. They left, and they didn’t come back for a few hours.

When they did return, they had soup for me. Gene was the one to spoon feed me since they weren’t going to risk untying me. It was then that I asked why they were doing this. I wanted to know why me, why on my honeymoon, and what they were going to do to me. Were they going to torture me? Probably not. They would’ve started doing that hours ago if they were sadists. Were they going to rape me? Gene and the second Unsub seemed too submissive to do something like that, but the first Unsub hadn’t even looked at me once since taking me, which was… interesting. Were they going to kill me? Again, with every hour that passed with me unharmed only raised more questions because they clearly weren’t too keen on the idea of murdering me—at least, as far as I could tell.

Gene didn’t answer me, though. He stayed silent until I finished my soup, at which point he left the cabin again. I didn’t see any of them again until the morning. All of them still refused to look at me or come near me. Even the first Unsub, whom I had originally profiled as the potential dominant of the group—seemed _scared_ of me. I mean, not _of_ or _by_ me, but of looking or touching me for other, unknown reasons. That was when I started to put together that the three of them weren’t the only ones included in all of this. Someone with a dominant personality had to be pulling their strings. They seemed so confident at first, probably because someone gave them a script and a plan, but now that they had me, they didn’t know what to do. It was possible that they had further orders, but I couldn’t be sure. If they had orders to torture or rape me, I was going to be very shocked if they tried. Killing me was probably worse than those two orders, too. If someone said: “Hey, go kidnap this person. Here’s how to do it, step by step—” it was somewhat easy for peer pressure to sneak in and convince people to say sure. But once the reality of their situation started settling in, I could tell that they looked like a group of headless chicken.

They only fed me for lunch, then left for that second day. That was all. None of them looked at me, touched me, said anything to me— Nada. They would whisper in the corner quietly about what to do next or what to do with me, but each of them seemed too scared to say anything. They were clueless cowards. For them, that wasn’t good news; but for me, that was great news. It meant that getting out of there was going to be… _somewhat_ easy.

On the third day, though, that was when things started getting interesting. They all came storming in, and I was convinced that they were finally going to do something to me. I closed my eyes and thought to myself that I was sorry I never got to tell Hotch the truth. I was sorry that he had to lose someone he loved again. After Haley, I promised him that nothing bad would happen… But this… If Foyet killing Haley hadn’t broken him—which I knew it did, of course—then this was going to absolutely kill him. Mostly, I was sorry that I couldn’t be there to pick up the pieces. I was sorry that he wouldn’t have someone there to hold him as he cried and mourned. That was supposed to be my job. I made a vow to him that I would always protect him mentally and physically, and I failed. I let him down because I wasn’t fast enough to find a way out. I couldn’t find a way back to him. And I was just… sorry.

But then they shocked me. The second Unsub pulled a phone from his pocket as Gene untied me. No matter how sorry I was, no matter how desperate I was to get out of there, I still didn’t see my chance. If I was stupid, I could’ve made a run for it immediately, but they would have caught me, and they would’ve told whoever was really in charge of this, and they were going to go kill Hotch. I couldn’t do that. So, I had to keep looking for my potential opening.

“You have one minute to call him. You’re going to tell him that you’ve left the island and that you’re not coming back. You’re going to act like everything’s alright and insist that he shouldn’t go looking for you. Got it?”

I nodded, “Yeah,” and I took the phone.

The phone was a burner, and it was an old flip phone— similar to the one Hotch used up until I finally bought him a damn iPhone. The call would be coming from an unknown, blocked number, and Hotch probably had no idea that I was taken. If there was any chance that Hotch had told the team yet, or was in contact with Garcia at all, it still wouldn’t matter. A phone like this wouldn’t be easy to trace, which was probably the point. Even Garcia, in all her glory, would need time to trace it— just like she did with Foyet when he took Sam’s phone all that time ago. These guys were smart to pick a phone like this and to give me a time limit they knew wouldn’t be achievable for tracing.

I watched them standing around me while I dialed Hotch’s number. With my eyes still racing between them, I lifted the phone to my ear and listened to the dial tones. Like I said, it was an unknown number calling Hotch; and even though he always picked up his phone, no matter what, he was probably staring at his screen while considering who the hell would be calling him.

The call picked up. “Hello?”

My right arm slid over my stomach as I heard his voice for the first time in, what felt like, forever. He sounded nervous, uneasy about something— probably the fact that I had left him on our honeymoon without so much as a goodbye. There was so much I wanted to tell him, like how much I loved him, and that I wasn’t okay, and that… that I had the best surprise for him. I wanted to tell him how to find me, but how the hell was I supposed to do that when I didn’t even know where I was? I had to try, though. I had to do my best. The Unsubs asked me to present myself as calm, but this was all so out of character for me, and this call would prove it to Hotch. So, if the team wasn’t already with him, then they would be soon, meaning there would be a team of the best agents the FBI had out looking for me. Even if I left a code as complicated as the Zodiac Killer’s, they would solve it. These idiots wouldn’t know that there was anything wrong about my behavior or words if I just played it smart and played it in a way that would catch Hotch’s attention.

I had one chance to make this message work. One chance and that was all. There was no room for error, and there certainly wasn’t any chance I could flat out tell him everything I wanted. My options were limited, so I just had to take a deep breath, find my cool, gather my thoughts, and do this as smoothly as possible.

“Hey, baby…” I said as bravely as I could.

Hotch gasped on the other side when he heard that it was me. “Y/N, where are you?”

“Sweetie, I need you to just listen. Tell me everything's going okay at work, first.”

“What? Y/N, just tell me where you are! We’ve been trying to find you—”

“I’m fine, Aaron. Listen—”

“Y/N—”

“Listen.” I took in a deep breath and looked at the masked men sitting around me. “Hey, do you remember the Mill Creek Killer case? Everyone’s been talking about it recently. Reid said that there’s something important we missed there, so I’ve gone to check it out. Everyone at work should keep doing what they’re doing.”

“Stop this, Y/N. Right now. What’s going on with you?”

“I love you, Hotch. I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

I hung up the phone before he could say anything. Now all I had to do was just pray that he knew what I meant and that someone— probably Reid— could understand what the hell I meant. If they didn’t put it together, I was going to die before I could tell Hotch the truth and say goodbye.

* * *

**HOTCH’S POV**

I grabbed my wallet from the dresser before sliding my sneakers on. My phone was still in my hand, and there was no way in hell I was going to let it out of my sight after what just happened. Out of fucking nowhere, Y/N called me, and they were acting like everything was totally fine and that I shouldn’t be worried about them. What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Continue lounging around on the beach while drinking sunset drinks? Fuck that. They wouldn’t have left randomly, and they wouldn’t have made a call like that in a million years.

I replayed their words over and over in my head as I drove to the station on the other side of the island. They had dodged my questions, but they seemed calm, but their words were far from anything _normal_. Why did they talk about work when we were supposed to be on vacation, and we hadn’t been in contact with the team at all since leaving? Not to mention that they never called me ‘sweetie’. It was always baby, Aaron, Hotch, Agent Hotchner— if they were being playful—or Sir— if the time called for it. But never, ever ‘sweetie’.

Something was wrong, but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was yet. Hopefully, the team would be able to figure it out. They had been at the station since I called them in after Y/N initially went missing. I knew from the moment I came back to the condo that evening that something happened, but without my team to give an outside perspective, I wouldn’t have been able to start piecing the puzzle together. They searched the condo as though it were any normal crime scene, but just like me, they found nothing out of the absolute ordinary— like blood or signs of a struggle. Besides the missing usual signs of a kidnapped person, the only clues and evidence we had was their wedding ring and their clothes. That was it. Someone spent a great deal of time trying to make it look like they left of their own volition, but I knew better.

While I tried to spend every second at the station with the team in order to run through any possible leads, there was nothing. And after two days of not sleeping, Rossi sent me back to the condo to try and rest. Despite tossing and turning in an empty bed all night, I finally fell asleep when I thought about how this was probably all just a big misunderstanding and they would be in my arms when I would wake up. That hope was what helped me sleep peacefully, but when there was no one to hold and kiss in the morning, I knew that I had to race back to the station to help again, and that was when I got the call.

At the police station, I found the team sitting in the main office, talking with the lead detective on the case. He was a good man who had immediately gone out to the condo when I first called the police to tell them something happened. Originally, no one was going to look into it because it hadn’t yet been twenty-four hours since Y/N went missing, but when I told them that we were FBI agents on vacation, they send Detective Akina to help me out while my team got on the jet for a thirteen hour trip. He knew that if I thought that something was wrong, then something really must have happened. He probably saw a thousand different cases just like this of tourists going missing on the island, and he could’ve dismissed me and my worry, but he didn’t. He was extremely helpful, and for that, I was eternally grateful.

“Hotch, you have to see this. Y/N bought a plane ticket last night for the mainland.” JJ hurried over with a piece of paper in hand.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Texas.”

I snatched the document from her and started skimming. That didn’t make any sense. On the phone, Y/N told me that they had gone back to St. Louis to handle something with the Mill Creek Killer investigation— which I knew was total bullshit because there was nothing to about that case since we put him behind bars for good over a year ago. But this ticket for Texas just further proved that something was amiss. Why did they tell me they were dealing with a case from St. Louis if they bought a plane ticket for Texas, of all places?

“Did they check in for the flight?” I asked JJ.

She nodded. “Someone with their name did, at least. Maybe they really did just leave, Hotch. What’s so bad about that? Maybe they got called away on a case or something—”

I glared at her before shoving the page back into her hands. There was no way in hell that the team actually believed that Y/N would leave like this, right? It was so out of character for Y/N to just up and leave without telling me. They would never leave me and Jack. Yeah, they were reckless, and they liked to do things their way, but that didn’t include running away from our honeymoon after leaving their ring. Haley had done that when she was finally done and decided to leave me. Why would Y/N marry me if they were just going to run off? Easy answer, they didn’t fucking run off— just like I said.

What was the point of calling the team to Maui if they weren’t going to listen and be helpful? When I called to tell them that Y/N was missing, they all asked me why I thought so. I built the case file myself the second I knew that Y/N was gone, and I sent it to them, and they came down to Hawai’i as fast as they could. But why go to all that trouble if they weren’t going to believe me?

They saw the evidence at the condo themselves. Why would Y/N leave the island without their things? It made no sense. It was a set up crime scene and no one would fucking _listen_!

“Reid, have you talked to Y/N about the Mill Creek Killer investigation recently?”

Spencer looked up at me with pure confusion. “No. Why?”

I cursed under my breath as I walked to the board room. The whole team, fascinated with curiosity, followed me through the office. I walked up to the whiteboard, grabbed a marker, and started writing everything Y/N said on the phone. Everyone took their seats around the table as I transcribed every word exactly as it was said to me. When I was done, I tossed the marker on the table and sat down with the rest of the team. I sighed and rubbed my palms over my face to take a breather.

“Hotch, what is this?” Morgan questioned.

I looked up at all of them, “Y/N called as I was about to come in this morning.”

“What? They called?”

“That’s everything they said to me. Every time I tried to ask them a question, they dodged it. It was like they were adamant on saying these exact words and that’s all.”

“Maybe it was a script, if they really were taken,” Morgan shrugged.

 _If_ they were taken? Did Morgan doubt me, too? Did he doubt that I knew Y/N well enough to know that they wouldn’t have just disappeared without a trace just to call me randomly a few days later? Morgan was Y/N’s best friend, and he always bragged about how he knew when something was wrong with them—yet he was doubting this now. Something _was_ wrong. The signs were all there. Their things were still in the condo when I came back, their ring was on the counter, their things were still in the bedroom. They wouldn’t have left those things, and they certainly wouldn’t be talking about the Mill Creek Killer case again. That was so long ago. What was the point? All I remembered from that case was how we talked about maybe having kids one day and that the Hollow Man held them at gunpoint. What did that have to do with any of this?

“Wait,” Reid said, standing up. “They said this _exactly_? No paraphrasing or guessing on your end?”

“They said it _exactly_ like that. They sounded calm, collected, eloquent. They didn’t sound panicked or distressed in any way.”

“But they don’t usually talk like that,” he said, approaching the board. “These sentences sound so short and purposeful. If they had left to go somewhere, they would have used more words to try to explain themselves— they would use full sentences, in fact. And the subject is all over the place. They say hello to you, but then talk about the team, then the Mill Creek Miller, the team again.” He picked up the marker I threw and started circling letters on the board. “The best way to get out a secret message when you’re being watched is to hide it in your words. If you’re under stress, it can be too hard to do something less obvious and more complicated, so people tend to do the first code they can think of, which also happens to be one of the most popular.” He was circling the first letter of every sentence. “H. S. T. I. L. L. H. E. R. E. I. I. I. Cross out these because the first one was introductory and the last three were goodbye, and you end up with—”

“Still here,” Rossi finished. “They’re still on the island. That’s good. It means we can shut down transportation off of the island, which makes our search easier.”

“Actually, the island is approximately 727.2 square miles, and only about 70% of the island is inhabited. Most of what isn’t overrun by locals and tourists alike is just acres of uncharted forest. They could be anywhere out there,” Spencer stated. “And even if you wanted to shut down all transportation, the fishermen still need to leave the island every day in order to sustain the island and the economy. Not to mention that there are thousands of tourists here and hundreds of homeless people who are likely not in the system. While it seems like an easy task,” he chuckled to himself, “it’s probably close to imposs—”

“Reid,” Morgan warned.

Spencer stopped and looked over to me to see the look on my face, a mix of anger and disappointment, and he apologized for not having better news.

Emily shifted in her seat to get a better look at the board. “Why bring up this Mill Creek Killer case? What significance is there to it?”

They all looked to me for answers, even though I didn’t have any. I figured that it was probably just the first case they thought of, but the team was right… Y/N wouldn’t have mentioned that specifically unless something was going on. I had to revisit every memory of that trip. It started with the plane ride, how they wouldn’t stop toying with me, so I finally had to give in and punish them. Same thing in the car ride from the airport to the police station. We worked that entire case together, and for the most part, they seemed concerned about the concept of us having kids and if it was realistic for us. I had snapped at them when they asked about it because I was scared that we would come to a conclusion I wouldn’t like— and even though I apologized later with the intention of telling them that I wanted to have kids with them one day, they had already doubled back from the idea and insisted that it wasn’t realistic for us, even though I could see that it broke their heart to say it. After that, they were the one who got the Mill Creek Killer to confess, and they were the one who the Hollow Man took hostage in the precinct. That was everything. I didn’t understand how that could possibly have to do with them missing now. What could that tell us about where they were? Who took them? Why did they take them?

“Hotch,” Emily spoke up after I explained everything, “was Y/N avoiding raw fish while you guys were here together?”

I shrugged and nodded. “Why?”

She sucked in a breath. “Have you guys been… _trying_?”

I froze. No, we hadn’t been trying, but it wasn’t like we were actively doing everything we could to avoid it. There was a thrill that came from not using any immediate contraceptives, but I thought that they had been taking birth control. We weren’t trying, but… it was possible. They had brought up the Mill Creek Killer case because that was our huge discussion about kids. In fact, it was the only time we genuinely talked about having kids.

“Pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat raw fish,” Emily continued. “You’re in Hawai’i, the holy grail of fresh fish, and there’s only one reason you wouldn’t eat sushi every chance you get. If the one thing you can vividly remember about the case is talking about kids, and they weren’t eating raw fish, and they weren’t feeling well the night they disappeared…” she trailed off to let me come to the conclusion myself.

“Oh, my god…” I covered my shocked expression with my hand.

“It’s not the time to panic, Hotch,” JJ said as calmly as she could.

Morgan leaned forward in his seat and started writing notes. “So, we know that they’re on the island still. We know that whoever took them made them buy a plane ticket to make it look like they left, but they hadn’t packed any bags to make it look realistic. Whoever took them made them leave their ring. There was no forced entry in the condo and no sign of a struggle. So how did this happen? How did someone take them?”

“They could have let someone into the house,” Rossi offered. “Maybe it was someone dressed as a housekeeper or a resort employee, or maybe even someone posing as a lost tourist.”

“Y/N would have gone to the door with their gun, though,” I said, my mind still focused on the concept of them possibly being pregnant. “Even if someone looked innocent, they would have had their weapon nearby, just in case. They’ve been overly cautious since Foyet.”

“So, Y/N must have been caught by surprise. Maybe the door was unlocked, the Unsub snuck right in, and took Y/N before you could get back from the beach,” Emily said.

“Why leave the ring, then?” JJ questioned. “If the Unsub was in a rush to get out of there, he wouldn’t have spent time leaving evidence. And there weren’t any drag marks on the floors or scuff marks on the walls. If Y/N were knocked unconscious so that the Unsub could take them, they would have either been dragged or carried out, but there was no sign of either.”

“They went willingly,” I said, sitting up straight finally. “Y/N left those because it made the Unsub believe that they were helping him make it look like they ran off, but it was really telling me that something was very wrong.”

“Y/N’s a trained FBI agent, though. They don’t need a gun to take down an Unsub, even if they were caught by surprise. They would have fought like hell to get away. So why didn’t they?”

“If...” I swallowed hard at my next thought “ _If_ what Emily is saying ends up being true, then they did it to protect…” I hid my face again.

What a mess. There was so much going on, and it was clear that Y/N hadn’t even told me half of it yet. We came here to get away from this madness, but it somehow followed us. Why? Why couldn’t we just get a break? They told me the night they went missing that they had something important to tell me, and I said that we could wait to discuss it once I would come back. The restaurant was just down the path, on the beach— I could _see_ the condo, I could see our bedroom, I could have seen them if I just looked up from my phone. Now they were gone and there was a possibility that…

Honestly, I just wanted to throw up. I wanted to go to bed and suddenly wake up from this nightmare. I wanted to roll over to see that Y/N was still there, safe and happy, and that this had never happened. That I didn’t let them down. But that wasn’t the truth, right? It was all just an unreasonable dream. This was happening, and I _had_ let them down.

“Can you guys give us a minute?” Rossi asked the others. They all silently nodded, taking their files and notes with them before leaving the room. Rossi stood from his chair and took the empty one beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. “Y/N’s tough and smart. They’re going to be fine.”

“This shouldn’t have happened,” I murmured.

“You’re right. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.”

“It shouldn’t have to be like this for us all the time, Dave. We deserve to be happy, right?” I looked up at him with red eyes. “When do we get to stop looking over our shoulders and just _live_?”

Rossi shook his head slightly, “You don’t.”

I didn’t know what I had expected. In our line of work, this was always a possibility. I learned that lesson with Foyet. Anyone could get to us if they really wanted to. But I thought that we could afford to let our guards down just once and be who we wanted to be. We didn’t have to worry about work, Jack, or anything else. We could just… _be_ for two weeks. We earned that much, didn’t we? They deserved every ounce of happiness considering how much shit we had been dragged through. I felt like I needed to do more for them, to be worthy of having them, and I failed in every way.

“Maybe Gideon had the right idea about all of this. He got out when he just kept getting knocked down. How many more punches do we have to take before it’s enough?”

“Maybe he did have the right idea,” Rossi nodded, “but what good is it going to do if you’re just sitting around here, thinking about what could have been done differently? Right now, you need to focus on solving this case. It’s any other case. What would you do?”

Start at the very beginning. If it were any other case, we would start with what happened at the crime scene, look at victimology, find a motive and M.O. for the Unsub, profile the Unsub, then get one step ahead of him so that we could catch him. Step one was to review everything that happened leading up to Y/N’s disappearance. Rossi sat with me as we went through that entire day together. He took notes in his little notebook as I spoke, just to see if he could catch anything out of the ordinary or to have me expand on if he had any questions.

“That morning, Y/N and I woke up later than we intended, but we’re on vacation, so that was kind of expected. We had missed our chance to go get pineapple pancakes at a nearby diner that’s famous on the island, so we decided to just get lunch at a restaurant in Lahaina. We drove about fifteen minutes to get to the restaurant, then after eating, we went down to the beach to walk around for the day. They weren’t feeling well, so we decided to head back to the condo. On the way, they said that they wanted to stop at CVS for TUMS, so I waited in the car while they went in…”

My heart stopped. They didn’t get TUMS… Or maybe they did, but— My mouth felt unbearably dry. How could I not know? I should have realized that something was wrong when they told me to stay in the car. I should have been more insistent on me going in with them since they weren’t feeling well, and since they were… My head was spinning and the ringing that had been gone for so long was starting to come back. They always grounded me and helped to stop these feelings of worry whenever it would come about. They were always so good with helping me when my ears were bad and I could hardly hear them. More than anything, I wished that they were there with me at that moment, holding my face in their hands as they tried to calm me down.

“Hotch,” Rossi brought me back to reality with another squeeze of my shoulder, “what happened after you two got back to the condo?”

I took in a deep breath as I tried to piece together the rest of the memories. “They went inside while I went to go talk to the concierge about getting more towels since we were planning on going on a night swim. When I got back, they were coming out of the bathroom…” Jesus, I thought that they just weren’t feeling well, I didn’t think anything of it. How could I have been so fucking blind? All of the signs were right there. And my eyes shot wide as I looked up at Rossi, “We have to check the trash—” I made a move to stand up, but Rossi held me down.

We had torn the whole condo apart, but I never thought to check the trash in the bathroom, because… well… why would I? But now I had to know if we were right about Y/N. If they really did go to CVS for a pregnancy test, then it would have been left in the trash in the bathroom. If there wasn’t anything in there, though, then we had to start from square one about our Mill Creek Killer theory. It could be our first lead, but I needed to know for sure— Rossi just had to let me go.

“Aaron, I get it. I do. But you need to keep talking to me about that day, and I’ll send Emily and Morgan to search the condo again.”

“I need to see it for myself—”

“And you will. I promise. Right now, though, just keep walking me through everything you remember. You’re doing great, alright? Don’t lose focus. What happened after they came out of the bathroom?”

I settled in my seat, realizing that Dave was right. I just needed to… _breathe_. “They told me that they had something important to tell me, but I told them that I wanted to pick up our dinner from the restaurant on the beach before they would close, even though we weren’t hungry yet. I figured that we could put it in the fridge, and we could have it whenever we wanted.” I should have just shut my mouth and listened to what they wanted to tell me. Why did I care more about getting dinner that we weren’t even going to eat over listening to my wife? Fuck. I was such an idiot. “I left through the backdoor and walked down the path to the beach. I ordered what we liked to get from there, and while I was waiting for the food, I was on my phone, texting Jessica about how Jack was doing. She told me that he got an A+ on his history test that Y/N had been helping him study for.” They were so good with kids. They had proved to me every single day since meeting Jack that they were going to be a great parent, and I was so ready to have a kid with them, there were no words to even describe. But I never thought that it would all happen like this. “When I got the food, I went back to the condo, and I went to the kitchen to set the food down. When I turned into the kitchen, I saw their ring and necklace sitting there.”

“You guys didn’t fight at all that day?” he asked me plainly. I scrunched my brows together in confusion, then glared at him when I realized what he had asked me. He raised his hands up defensively, “I have to ask, Hotch. If there’s any way they actually did leave, we need to figure out why. If there was no reason, then, yeah, we’re looking for a missing person.”

“They are missing! What the fuck is so hard for everyone to understand here?!” I slammed my palm against the table and stood so that I could pace while thinking.

Dave sighed and scratched his beard. “Because there is absolutely no evidence to prove that someone took them, Hotch. You have to understand that we’re doing all that we can.”

“You’re not doing enough!” I snapped. “Someone took my wife, and we’re sitting in here, asking ourselves if they really did just up and leave during our honeymoon? What kind of sense does that make, Rossi?”

“Well, my second wife did it,” he chuckled to himself. I glared at him again. His smile disappeared in an instant. “Fine. Fine, Hotch. Someone took them. We’ve gone through the day and we haven’t found anything suspicious. What’s next?”

“Victimology.”

“Good. Why would someone take them here and not back at home?”

Trafficking wasn’t exactly popular on the islands because of how hard it was to transport people off the island, but kidnappings, rapes, and murders were more common, I guess. If this were any other case, we were supposed to look at the victim, profile them, and find out what in that profile attracted the Unsub. So who was Y/N? They were gorgeous. They were perfect. They were smart, funny, _annoying_ when they wanted to be _…_ They were driven, brave, passionate, capable, caring, sociable, witty, genuine, intuitive. They weren’t an easy target. After everything they had been through between their traumatic high school experience, losing Elle, nearly losing me a thousand times, and taking care of Jack after Haley died, they learned a lot about how to take care of themselves. If someone took them, they went for a reason. They weren’t lured away by a dumb ruse or held at gunpoint and forced to get into a van, because they would have seen through the first option and they would have won any fight they were in if it came down to the second option.

“There’s more than one Unsub,” I gasped. Rossi raised a brow. “Think about it. In the Academy, we all learn how to disarm an Unsub, even if you’re being held at gun or knife point. The only times I have ever seen them not disarm someone was when the Hollow Man took them hostage in a precinct full of other potential victims. They didn’t want to upset the Unsub, so they did what they were told. With Matloff, it was the same thing, but in a courthouse, and they didn’t do anything after leaving the building because they realized that Matloff wasn’t going to kill them. There is always a reason as to why they never disarmed someone before. But they were all alone. Even if they are pregnant, they wouldn’t have been afraid to grab the guy and throw him across the place if they wanted to. If someone came up right behind them, catching them off guard, and there were other Unsubs that were there to outnumber them, then they wouldn’t have fought because they knew it was pointless.”

“That’s a _huge_ conclusion to jump to without any evidence, Aaron.”

“I know, I know,” I insisted, sitting back down eagerly. “But I _know_ them. It’s the only way this could have happened.”

“So, let’s say you’re right. A group of Unsubs corral them and tell them ‘Come with us or we shoot you’, but why?”

“They’re attractive,” I shrugged. “Maybe someone saw us on the beach.”

“And they just so happened to kidnap an FBI agent? What are the odds of that when, like Reid said, there are thousands of other tourists walking around in swimsuits?”

He was right. There was a piece missing. FBI agents normally didn’t go missing for a thousand different reasons, most of them including the street smarts we were taught at the Academy and throughout the job, and self-defense tactics. Y/N was targeted specifically because the Unsubs knew who they were. This was planned. Someone knew we were coming here, and they knew exactly how and when to take Y/N. This was really fucking bad—worse than I had initially thought. Unfortunately, the “good:” news was that if this was a coordinated attack on us specifically, it meant that whoever took Y/N wasn’t going to kill them yet. That gave us some time to work.

* * *

**READER’S POV**

These fucking morons were over their heads. The longer they had me, the easier it was for me to notice all of their mistakes. They really had no idea what it was they were doing. First, they made the mistake of letting me call Hotch, and now, they were making the repetitive mistake of leaving me alone, giving me time to work on the knots that were holding my wrists together behind the chair I was in. They thought that they were smart cookies, I could tell, because they had used a very specific type of Boy Scout’s knots to tie me to the chair. Only problem was, this was part of basic training in the FBI. We learned how to undo knots like those while tied exactly like that just for these situations. Besides that, however, if I hadn’t gone to the Academy at all, I would have learned how to undo them from all of my years in the BDSM scene.

Being a submissive was easy because the Doms were responsible for using all of the complicated knots to tie me up, and I just had to play along. However, I wasn’t at all naïve to the fact that as a submissive, it was my job to make sure that I was safe and that my Dom always knew my limits so that nothing bad ever happened. In order to ensure my own safety, I learned _long_ before I joined the Academy how to perform and undo all kinds of knots. It just made life easier. But I knew that I would never, ever tell Hotch that I knew how to get out of all of his knots because it would simply break him—and actually probably challenge him to get a little creative, which would have been bad news for me.

But that was all besides the point. These knots keeping me to the chair was literally amateur hour. If I hadn’t been continuously interrupted by Gene or one of the other men coming in to check on me every so often, and not on any specific timeline, then I would have been out of there by then; but I had to play it cool and hold my work together when they were watching me. If they found out what I was doing, they would likely kill me just to ensure I wouldn’t get away. So, I played the long game.

And then they came in around dinner time, I think. The only way I could tell was when they opened the door and I saw that it was getting dark outside, but they hadn’t brought me any food yet, which meant that it wasn’t getting _too_ late yet. That was a relief. If another day were going to pass, I was going to die. It was honestly now or never. I knew that I had to get out of there soon, but the only problem was that they were now discussing what to do with me again while standing in the corner, huddled up in a way that Gene could still look over in my direction every time I shuffled around.

When I felt one of the final knots finally start to give out, I paused to assess the room. What was going to happen next? Well, the obvious answer was that I was outnumbered, which meant that I had to catch them off guard by acting quickly. If I made an initial dash for the door, they would kill me before I could even step foot outside, and I didn’t doubt that for a second. Two of them had holsters strapped to their belts. Only two. The other one had his gun simply buried into the back of his waistband. He was also the one who had a knife in his sock. Seemed dangerous, but to each their own, I supposed.

And then the rope released my wrists enough for my to gently slide out of them. I gulped. Just as the rope nearly slipped off my wrists, Gene looked over, making me catch it at the very last second. I looked away from him. All I could do was pray that he didn’t realize what had just happened, because if he had _any_ clue, he would come over to investigate, and I’d be absolutely fucked at that point. He didn’t seem to notice. Thankfully.

I groaned and hunched forward slightly. “Fuck…” I cursed under my breath. “Fuck…” I kept groaning until they stopped talking because I had caught their attention. “Help… Please…”

One of the Unsubs started approaching. Thankfully, it was the one who had his gun in his waistband and knife in his sock. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He kicked my ankle to encourage me to look up at him.

“My stomach.”

He squinted. “What?”

“Food…”

He glanced over his shoulder to check with his partners to see what they thought about this whole situation. When he wasn’t paying attention, I dropped the rope, and I quickly reached down to snatch the knife from his sock before he could even turn to face me again. As I leapt to my feet, I immediately grabbed his exposed gun with my free hand while stabbing his chest again and again. He started to fall to the ground. Just before he could fall out of my reach, I saw the other two reaching for their guns strapped into their holsters, and I was completely out in the open, a perfect target for them to hit. So, I grabbed the closest Unsub, holding him up in front of me as a human shield. That bought me enough time to limp over to the wooden boxes for cover. The second I was safe, I dropped the dead Unsub.

I pressed my back against the boxes and sighed. Okay, step one complete. I didn’t die. Wonderful. Now, the tough part. Since I had caught the first Unsub off guard, it was easy to kill him, but now that the other two were aware that I was free, armed, and dangerous; they likely already had their weapons out, too, and they were just waiting to shoot me. Again, it was another waiting game. Another _long_ waiting game of figuring out when the best opportunity to make my move would come about.

I listened. I waited. Every single breath, step, and movement they made seemed to echo throughout the entire cabin, letting me know exactly where they were. Gene was the closest. Telling by his height, weight, and stride, I could tell that he was the one approaching on my left, he was certainly closer. Another few steps, and I’d have him. So, I kept waiting. They were splitting up in attempt to give Gene back up and also to attack me from different sides. It wasn’t going to work if they didn’t attack simultaneously, though. I could use that to my advantage.

And then he was just within reach.

Gathering up all of my courage, I took a moment before ducking down and around the box, swiping at Gene’s feet until he was falling backwards, his gun leaving his hands before he could aim and press his finger down on the trigger. I beat him to it. I aimed up against his chin and fired. Before the other Unsub could figure out where I had moved to and what had happened, I leaned around the box and shot the outside of his left thigh, and then I shot his shoulder. Gene was dead, along with the first Unsub, but I had saved this last one on purpose.

I raced over to him and kicked his gun away, ensuring that he couldn’t regain his strength long enough to shoot me when I wasn’t looking. Just in case, I also shot his foot. I didn’t want him to be able to run away. I needed him alive because when the team would show up, they would be able to handle him.

The team.

“Phone,” I demanded, almost weakly. “Phone…” I fell onto my knees straddling his chest, pulling him up by his collar to make him look at me. “Where’s the satellite phone?” When he didn’t answer me, I pressed my thumb against the wound in his shoulder. He cried out. “Where is it?!”

“Gene had it!” he exclaimed, trying to crawl away from my touch.

I stood and stumbled somewhat on my way back over to Gene, barely catching myself with my palms on the ground. Gene’s cold, dead eyes were staring up at the ceiling as I leaned over him to search his body for the burner phone they had used to make me call Hotch. When I patted down his front and couldn’t find it, I moved to roll him over, but he was… heavy. I groaned as I put all of my strength into it. Jack would’ve been so disappointed in me since he thought that I was literally Wonder Woman considering how “strong” our Superman hugs were. But that was when I found it. It was buried in the back right pocket of Gene’s pants, and it was a miracle that he hadn’t crushed it as he fell to the ground after I shot him. I’d take the miracle.

My hands were shaking as I dialed the first number I could think of. The one person who could truly help me in my current predicament… I couldn’t wait to be out of there… Within an instant, she picked up. “Garcia? It’s Y/N.”

“Y/N? Oh— Oh, my god— You’re alright! You’re okay! I—”

“Garcia, I need you to listen to me. I don’t know where I am, so I need you to trace this call right now.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” I heard her tapping away on her keyboard. “You’re okay… Thank god you’re okay…”

“Two of the Unsub are dead. I shot one in the shoulder, thigh, and foot. We need two ambulances. One for him and one for me.” I cringed as my head ached. “Connect me to Hotch, please.”

“Right— right… You’re okay,” she cheered slightly. “You’re okay—”

“Garcia.”

“I know, I know.”

The phone started ringing again for the shortest moment before I heard Hotch pick up. “Y/N?” he asked, desperate to know if it was really me calling again.

“I’m here. I’m fine. Garcia’s figuring out where I am right now—”

“I’ve got it!” Garcia cheered. “I’m sending it to your phones right now,” she told Hotch.

Before I could say anything, Hotch said, “I’m coming, baby. I love you so much.”

My hand fisted around the fabric of my shirt over my stomach as I felt myself let out a breath of relief. I missed his voice so much— I missed all of him, of course… but I missed how soothing his voice could be, and I missed how his words never failed to warm my heart and bring me comfort. I was so ready to just hold him in my arms again and have him tell me a thousand times that he loved me. That reassurance was the only thing keeping me upright as I felt my head spin again.

“Garcia, how close are the ambulances?” I asked quietly.

She hesitated. “You’re so deep in the jungle… it’ll probably take them at least thirty-five minutes.”

“Aaron?” I asked him for an ETA.

“We’re coming as fast as we can,” he insisted. 

That wasn’t an answer, though, so I waited silently for him to budge and give me a time. An ambulance was going to have a hard time driving around the island to get where I was. The narrow roads were unforgiving and didn’t allow wiggle room for the cars that needed to move out of the way to let it pass. Not to mention that we probably weren’t near any main road. They might have to take some of the trip by foot, which was going to be a hassle and a half. Hotch and the team, though, they were probably in smaller cars, easier to maneuver, easier to take off roading, if need be. Even if they couldn’t get all the way into the jungle with the cars they were in, they could get much closer, then take the rest of it by foot.

Hotch noted my silence, still waiting for a real answer while keeping all of that in mind. “At least twenty minutes,” he admitted regretfully.

I sat down in the chair that they had tied me to in the middle of the room so that I had a clear view of the Unsub writhing in pain on the ground. “I’ll be waiting.”

* * *

As always, Morgan kicked the front door of the cabin down, even though there was no threat. Even though it made me jump and yelp in shock, I was honestly glad to just see that the team was still doing what they always did. Morgan moved into the cabin first, Hotch right after him, then Emily, Reid, Rossi, and JJ. Emily and Morgan went to clear the room, even after they saw me sitting on the chair in the middle with the spotlight over me. Reid and JJ immediately saw the wounded Unsub on the ground and went to make sure that he wouldn't bleed out before the medics could arrive. Rossi stayed in the doorway, standing just behind Hotch, who seemed frozen in place.

Hotch had lowered his weapon the second he had run into the cabin and stepped to the side so that the rest of the team could pour in, but he didn’t move after that. His eyes were on mine, and I was thinking about how I needed him to come to me or I’d fall over if I tried to run up to him. I could see that he was just paralyzed by shock and distraught. I wasn’t bashed up or hurt in any way, but I definitely looked like shit, and he was probably just grateful to find me alive.

Rossi gave Hotch a slight nudge forward, giving Hotch the courage he needed to approach me slowly. He slowly broke down the closer he got to me, overwhelmed by a million different feelings. Knowing Hotch and how he dealt with these kinds of things, he was probably blaming himself, telling himself that he somehow failed me, that he should have done more to prevent this or to find me sooner. He was probably beating himself up about all of this even though none of it was his fault.

Hotch collapsed to his knees in front of me. I leaned forward, meeting him halfway as he hid his face against my stomach. I tangled my fingers in his hair and kissed the top of his head. He shook as he hugged my legs and I tried not to cry. He was always the strong one, but after everything we had been through, one thing after another, he was fragile and always likely to break. I needed to stay strong for him so that he wouldn’t fall apart all over again.

Eagerly, he sat up straight in order to get a good look at me. “Mill Creek?” he asked with worried eyes.

I nodded and smiled lightly. “It was the only way I could think of telling you without telling them.”

“You did so good, baby.” He grabbed my face and kissed me gently. “I love you so much.” His left hand fell to my stomach and stayed there as he held me. “Why did they do this?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I left one of them alive to ask him…” I pointed to the Unsub who was still squirming on the floor as Reid tried to stop his bleeding until the EMTs could show up. 

Hotch frowned as he looked over at the man who took me, begging for help, pleading for his own life, ignoring all the harm he had done over the past few days. Hotch kissed me again before pushing himself to his feet and storming over to the Unsub. He pushed Reid out of the way and grabbed the man by his shirt so that he could ask the one question all of us had been dying to know the answer to: “Why?”

The Unsub looked up at Hotch and kept crying from the pain of his wounds and because he had been caught. Hotch demanded an answer again, and the Unsub gave in. “The Reaper!” he screamed. “We did it for the Reaper!”

Hotch punched the Unsub in the nose, “George Foyet’s dead!” He punched again, and I recalled how Hotch beat Foyet’s face in with the same anger pulsing through his veins.

The Unsub begged for Hotch’s mercy and said that he would give answers in return. Hotch stopped hitting the man, taking the offer he was given. “There’s a website where he’s been posting his last wishes. He wants people to continue his work… If you prove yourself to him, you get access to all of his final wishes and tasks. Killing her was one of them.”

Hotch punched him again, “Foyet’s dead!” He kept repeating it like that was going to change anything. “He can’t be giving you these _tasks_ from the grave.”

“Someone’s posting them for him, then! All I know is that we were told to kill Y/N. They told us where you guys would be, when to take her, and how to do it. That’s all I know. Please,” he cried. “Please… I don’t know anything else.” Hotch landed another punch, though.

“Hotch, stop it,” Morgan demanded, pulling him off of the Unsub.

Hotch shook off Morgan’s grip and he hurried back over to me. He brushed his fingers through my hair. “Did they…” He didn’t know how to ask, but I knew what he meant. We had seen a thousand different cases just like this, and we knew what horrible things people were capable of. I had already become a victim once before; he didn’t want it to happen again.

I shook my head. “They didn’t touch me.” They were cowards who were in over their heads. They had been waiting around for one of them to gain the courage to hurt me, but by the time they realized that they didn’t know what they were doing, I had enough. “I’m fine.”

He screwed his eyes shut as he sat up on his knees and pecked my lips before pulling me into a tight embrace. “I love you…” he cried into my hair.

I nuzzled my face in the crook of his neck, taking in his scent, the feeling of his scratchy 5 o’clock shadow against my cheek, the warmth of his arms around me, and the way he said he loved me into my ear. There were moments where I thought that I would never get this again. I thought that it would be the end, that we wouldn’t get to see each other one last time… I had feared the worst, thinking that I would be gone, and he would find me like he found Haley, and he would blame himself. But now I was in his arms, both of us crying, both of us thinking about how lucky I was to be safe, and how we were going to have a little baby Hotchner soon.

“Hotch,” Rossi whispered calmly, “the ambulance made it.”

We parted just in time to see the flashing red and blue lights outside. Hotch nodded a thank you to Rossi before he slowly helped me up onto my feet. “You okay?” he asked me. I nodded. “Okay.” We started limping out of the cabin together, meeting the paramedics just outside. They took me from Hotch’s arms so that they could load me onto a stretcher that they rolled into the ambulance.

“JJ,” I said when I saw her pass by the ambulance they were setting me in. She looked at me. “Will you ride with me?”

She furrowed her brows. “Me?”

The two of us hadn’t been getting along since New York nearly two years ago. She had unfortunately not been supportive of mine and Hotch’s decision to get married and have kids—even though those plans had obviously been postponed afterwards for a multitude of reasons. But now… She was the only one who understood. She was the only one on the team who understood what was happening to me, and she was the only one who knew the lengths I went to and would go to in order to protect my child now. For some reason, that brought me comfort. After everything I just went through, I surprised even myself by asking her to ride with me and Hotch, not Morgan. She still seemed to know, though. So, she nodded an acceptance to the invitation.

Hotch climbed into the ambulance first, then helped JJ in. When they were both settled on the benches next to me, the paramedic riding in the back with us closed the door then signaled for his partner to start driving through the jungle.

Hotch grabbed my hand and kissed my knuckles. His eyes were still pouting, but he had at least stopped crying long enough to try and smile at me behind my hand. JJ seemed to be smiling at us, too. We didn’t despise each other anymore like we had back after New York. A lot had happened since then which encouraged us to at least get along long enough to forget all of our problems. Now, we were just impartial. In that ambulance, though, I could tell that she finally saw the truth about me and Hotch. Emily called it during the wedding, but I saw it finally it in her face that she knew.

“Aaron…” I muttered. “Are you okay with this?”

He cocked a brow at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Are you happy that we’re… you know… having a baby?”

His face softened. “Are you kidding?” When I shook my head, he pouted his eyes and squeezed my hand as tight as he could. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. But I am _so_ excited.” He leaned down to kiss me. “Are you okay with it?”

I nodded and smiled against him.

“I love you.”

My smile against his lips widened as a tear ran down my cheek. “I love you, too.”


	42. OVERPROTECTIVE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TIMELINE: Season 6 Episode 09. A month after part forty-one.

A week stuck in the house after getting back from Hawai’i was a week too long. All I wanted to do was get back to work and act like nothing happened, because, really, nothing did happen. Yeah, _something_ happened, but it could have been way worse. I handled the situation before it could get bad, and the team found me. As for the only surviving Unsub who took me, Morgan and Emily went to question him after he got out of surgery. They asked him about this website that Foyet had supposedly set up for his fans, but by the time they got the name of it, it was gone, and Garcia couldn’t find anything about it. She searched far and wide, even trying to recover the site itself, but whoever really set it up was good, and they knew how to cover their tracks.

All we knew was how the site operated. According to the Unsub, there were levels of the “membership”. Those who wanted to join Foyet’s little minion club, or whatever the fuck it was, had to start at level one with a misdemeanor. The higher up they wanted to move through the levels, the more intense the crimes got. The third to last level, the one the Unsub and his friends were on, was killing me. Throughout the whole ordeal— from the moment they bid on the task in the level, up until I managed to shoot two of them, they were in contact with the person in charge. He told them where to find me, when to take me, how to do it, where to take me, what to do about the call, but they came to a screeching halt when they were told that they needed to send a piece of me, one at a time, to Hotch and Jack. For a group of criminals who worked through the levels of robbery, rape, child abductions, and animal murder, it was surprising to me that they wouldn’t even try to follow their orders. I mean, they could have at least— Maybe that wasn’t anything to ponder on.

When asked what the last two levels were, however, the Unsub told us that he didn’t know because the bids were hidden from anyone on the lower levels. They had been the first group to make it to the “my” level, no one knew what the last two were. If I had to guess, though, based on what I knew about Foyet and his mission to ruin Hotch’s life, I was going to take a wild guess that the second one was likely hurting Jack— which was already unthinkable— and the first… the first was Hotch.

Foyet liked torturing Hotch. From the stabbings to killing Haley, Foyet enjoyed making Hotch’s life a living hell. Even from the grave, Foyet was doing his best to break down Hotch. He wanted Hotch’s life to fall apart around him, to have him lose everything before he would finally be targeted, too. From what we knew, the only task the Unsubs had with me was sending me off in pieces. That was it. The consideration to do more, the conversations I had overheard, was of their own volition; but it also happened to be their downfall. With Hotch, the task was probably to make it as painful as possible. Honestly, I didn’t want to consider the options after knowing what Foyet had already done.

After the Unsub was out of the hospital, our questioning completed, he was processed, and it was finally out of our hands. When we got home, I practically collapsed in the doorway, catching Jack in my arms as he ran to me for a Superman hug. I had never been more relieved to see him in my life since Foyet took him. I held him in my arms for as long as I could, even when he tried to protest that I was hugging him too tight. I never wanted to let him go. Even when he started asking questions about what happened on our vacation, because something was clearly wrong, I just stayed as still and quiet as possible because I just wanted to hold my son in my arms.

Hotch made me stay home for the week following that while he practically catered to my ever want and need. In a way, I suppose, I was under house arrest. All I was missing was the ankle monitor; and, honestly, it wouldn’t have surprised me if I would have woken up with one on. Hotch was being a little too protective since it happened. While I tried to not blame him because he was obviously still trying to get over the fact that he could have lost me, I just wanted to get back out there and live my life. I wanted to get back into the field; I wanted to see our friends; I wanted to mess around with Morgan and Emily all the time. I didn’t want to feel like a wounded, little lamb.

What happened to me wasn’t even that bad, as I said. All I had were a few cuts and bruises, yet Hotch was acting like my entire body was broken and he needed to do everything for me. He didn’t go to work, he hardly even let me out of my sight. It was like the days following Haley’s death where I watched Hotch and Jack like a hawk because I was afraid that if I let them out of my sight for even a moment, I would never see them again. Hotch probably felt the same way about me this time around… But I really just needed him to take a step back and let me breathe.

When I did get back to work about a month after Hawai’i, it wasn’t an easy transition. All the way to the office, Hotch tried to convince me into reconsidering going back. If it were up to him, I would have been at home for the next nine months or so. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be locked up for months on end, sitting around, worrying about Hotch and the rest of the team as they went out to work on hundreds of cases without me. That wasn’t going to happen. I had a life to get back to. I could deal with my trauma outside of work— just like Hotch, who was still going to therapy because of what happened with Foyet while still going to work, too. And if he was just worried about me being pregnant, which I was sure was a factor, then he had to understand that it wasn’t a big deal yet. It was a miracle, of course, but it wasn’t impeding my ability to work just yet.

I just had to keep reminding Hotch that I had been to hell and back a thousand times, and this was just one more thing to add to the shit list. If I could get through all of that, I could get through this. But if Hotch started blowing this all out of proportion and made a big deal out of it, we were going to have problems. I compared it to when he found out the truth about those photos the Fisher King had taken out of my jewelry box, and he promised that he wouldn’t treat me any differently knowing what he knew now. I needed that understanding back. He always told me that he trusted my judgement—if he didn’t, he would have never let me go near that train Elle was being held hostage on in Texas a few years back—so I just needed him to trust me now. I was going to be fine. I _was_ fine.

On Tuesday, after driving into work and getting some reports done, the team gathered in the roundtable room to discuss potential cases. Only, JJ already had a case in mind. Daniel Lanham, a ten year old boy, was reported missing on a camping trip by his father last November… Over a year ago… He was never found. In fact, the case had run so cold, that the police were initially grasping at straws by trying to pin the whole disappearance on the father. However, with no forensic evidence tying him to a crime, they couldn’t arrest him; but now that Daniel’s body had just appeared on the Appalachian Trail, questions were starting to stir and fingers were being pointed again.

I stared at the photo of that boy’s decayed body. He was only ten. How could someone do this to a child—How could someone do this to their _own_ child, if that were really the case. I mean, there were signs of care and remorse with the body that indicated personal attachment that a father could potentially have. Daniel’s body had been wrapped in a plastic bag that was buried underground and covered by elements, all in the name of preserving and protecting the body from weather, animals, natural accelerated decay, etc. But this was an opportunistic crime. Our Unsub, if he was hunting for a victim on the Appalachian Trail, had to sit and wait for the perfect boy to come along. Or if Daniel’s father was responsible, he had to wait until his son was alone with him. Either way, it was an opportunity that arose, not a sophisticated, targeted attack. That was… unless…

“JJ, are there any more missing persons or mysterious deaths on the trail that could be connected to this?” I asked.

“The Rangers contacted me with this case, and they claimed that they’ve never seen anything like it. So, I’m going to assume not. But I’ll check with them when we get on the jet, just in case.”

“It says here that Daniel’s father went back to the trail every month in search for his son?” Hotch questioned, looking through the file. “And then he stopped in March.” He stopped in his tracks as a realization hit him. “Which is about the same time the M.E. estimates Daniel was killed.” He closed his case file. “Y/N, we’ll talk to Mr. Lanham when we arrive at the Park Ranger’s office. JJ, can you have them organize that while we’re on the jet and you’re contacting them about similar cases?”

“Sure,” she answered.

“Prentiss and Morgan, when we get to the trail, you guys should head out to where Daniel Lanham’s body was found in order to get an understanding of this Unsub’s level of mental stability.”

By that, he was alluding to the fact that we weren’t sure if our Unsub was Mr. Lanham or not. If this presented as organized or disorganized, it would help us conclude on way or another, and if there was anything else important out there that they Rangers missed, it might help us build our profile. So, it truly made sense that we would send someone out there. But I wished that it were me. Hotch usually teamed me up with Morgan—or, at times, Morgan and Emily. I wanted to go on the trail with them so bad. But Hotch wanted me to stay back in the Ranger’s office with him in order to question Mr. Lanham, even though that was a small enough task for one of us to do alone.

* * *

The Park Ranger’s office was more like a large cabin. Actually, that was exactly what it was—and it was similar to Gideon’s cabin, but perhaps twice that size. There was one main office where all of the Rangers had been waiting for our arrival, then there was the lead Ranger’s office to the left, and, lastly, set ahead was a boardroom where we could meet privately if need be. As we walked in, we were immediately told that Mr. Lanham was waiting for us in said boardroom.

While Emily and Morgan turned on their heels to head straight out to the trail as Hotch ordered, Rossi, Reid, and JJ moved to the table in the middle of the room that had a large map taped down to it for us to get our bearings. Reid immediately started building the geographical profile. So, while he was busy with that, and JJ and Rossi were getting caught up with the Ranger’s investigation, Hotch and I headed into the boardroom.

Hotch held the door open for me. I silently thanked him as I headed inside to see Mr. Lanham sitting at a desk, never looking up to acknowledge us. We carefully approached.

“Mr. Lanham, I’m Agent Hotchner, this is Agent Greenaway, and we’re with the Behavior Analysis Unit at the FBI. We’ve been called in to investigate your son’s death.” Hotch pulled a chair out for me. “We need to ask you some questions.” After I sat down, Hotch moved to take a seat in the chair next to me.

Mr. Lanham shrugged, keeping his eyes lowered, his hands in his lap, his leg shaking nervously under the table. All signs that he had issues with authority. Some of them were signs of guilt, but they could also be attributed to his frustration with the FBI questioning him when he thought that everyone had forgotten him as a suspect. I understood why he felt that way. However, it was necessary to ask him these questions in order to confirm or deny if he had any involvement in his son’s death. So far, it was inconclusive.

“You went almost twice a month out to the site where your son disappeared from November to March. And then you stopped going.”

He nodded. “That’s correct.”

“Why? Why stop at the same time he died? Because that looks awfully suspicious to us, Mr. Lanham.”

“I don’t know. Alright? I just—” He let out a heavy sigh as his body slumped in his seat. A sign of defeat rather than guilt. “I had this… _feeling_ that he was gone. And it was taking too much out of me to keep searching. You probably don’t know what that feels like.”

I glanced over at Hotch. When Foyet took Haley and Jack, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that something terrible was going to happen, and no one was going to be able to stop it. And then Haley died. My suspicions had been confirmed, my heart shattered in my chest, and yet… the anxiety dialed back. I could remember still being hysterical and worried out of my mind because I wasn’t _sure_ if Hotch and Jack were dead; but… Now that we were sitting there and Mr. Lanham had brought up this “feeling” he had, I realized that some part of me that day knew that they were still alive. I still had a sliver of hope that Jack was just hiding, safe and sound in his secret spot, and I had a feeling that Hotch was alright. And I was correct. Hotch was beaten and broken, of course, but he was alive. And my little man was alive. So, I understood that “feeling” Mr. Lanham had referred to.

Hotch moved on. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you used to take Daniel camping every weekend.”

“Yes. His mother had full custody, but she allowed me to see him on the weekends.”

Hotch and I knew _that_ feeling all too well. Haley practically had full custody, but she allowed us to see Jack whenever we were in town; but it was still hard. Co-parenting was hard. I couldn’t imagine how Hotch did it alone all those years.

“So, the night he disappeared, what happened?” I asked. Mr. Lanham didn’t respond because he seemed at a loss for words. Even though he had recited his story a thousand times for local police, state police, Park Rangers, and so on, he couldn’t find the right words anymore. I really couldn’t blame him.

“You set up camp…” Hotch began egging him on once he noticed Mr. Lanham’s hesitancy. “You fell asleep… And then… A man came into your tent?”

“No. No one came into the tent. Daniel got up because he had to use the bathroom. He didn’t wake me up because he was in that phase where he was convinced that he didn’t need his dad protecting him all the time…” He sniffled. “So, I rolled over and I went back to sleep. I should’ve—” His voice cracked behind a sob. “I should’ve gone after him. But I didn’t.”

“Mr—” I began, but he interrupted me.

“I was his hero, and I failed,” Mr. Lanham cried before hiding his face in his hands out of shame.

I recognized the look on his face as he had said it, though. It was the same look Hotch wore for months after Haley died. He was ashamed that he couldn’t have done more to save her, and he failed at being Jack’s superhero when he needed it most.

“I don’t care that you all think I’m guilty. Because I am! I am guilty! I didn’t protect my son when he needed me most.” He looked up at us. “If I could go to prison for _that_ , I would.”

Without a doubt, I knew that there was no way Mr. Lanham hurt his son. That kind of thinking—that sort of regret couldn’t be replicated by any kind of sociopath. No. Only a true grieving father who had been through hell could possibly feel that way. And since I had seen Hotch go through the exact same motions after Haley’s death, I knew that Mr. Lanham was innocent, and that he wasn’t putting any kind of show on for us. He genuinely regretted that night.

But I just couldn’t sit there and keep listening to his distraught cries. The way he was sobbing while blaming himself for something he had no control over only took me back to over a year ago where Hotch practically collapsed in my arms after Haley’s wake, and he pleaded with me about moving houses because he couldn’t stand being in that house anymore. The cries were eerily similar. And the worst part was, that parental regret that Mr. Lanham was starting to rub off on me when it came to Jack, and now the regret was turning into panic with our baby. Fuck.

I stood and saw myself out of the boardroom. Hotch was hot on my heels, likely because he didn’t want to listen to it any longer, either. The superhero thing hit too hard. We were Jack’s superheroes—we always had been—and the day that Foyet killed Haley, we failed him. We couldn’t protect him and his mom practically the one time it mattered most. Before, I used to regret that deeply, of course, but now that there were… other factors involved… I felt all of that ten times harder now, and it made me reflect on what the hell Hotch and I were actually going to do to prevent something like that from happening ever again. I didn’t want it to be Jack or our baby that we would lose next time—No. There would be no next time… This was exactly why I had to get away from Mr. Lanham while he was like that.

Apparently, Emily and Morgan had gotten back from the trail while we were talking to Daniel’s dad. They were standing around the map table in the middle of the office, a marker in Emily’s hand as they told Rossi and Reid everything they found out there. More bodies. And by more, I mean _a lot_ more. Where they went to find Daniel’s burial ground, they ended up finding at least a dozen other bodies that Rangers were working to dig up currently so that they could be identified. So, this just turned serial.

“His name is Tyler Dale. He was the same age as Daniel when he went missing, and he was on a family trip when it happened,” Morgan explained, catching me and Hotch up to date with what everyone else knew.

Reid immediately scurried off with this new information to work on something that was churning in his mind, something that he couldn’t explain to us quite yet or it would ruin his thought process. We all turned to watch him silently work. We knew that whatever it was, it was likely important, and likely to help us. Honestly, if I were to guess, now that I was watching him scan through both Daniel and Tyler’s files a mile a minute, he was probably working on victimology. If he wasn’t, I was going to start. He was the fast reader, but I was the quick spotter. I almost wanted to challenge him one day into seeing who could solve a cold or closed case first—like the Foothpath Killer. Considering I solved that one the fastest, and Gideon was incredibly impressed, I was sure I could win against Spencer Reid.

And then he jumped to his feet with a thought. Okay… So, maybe he would put up a good fight. But I liked a challenge. I kept considering it as Reid set the files out on the map table and started dialing Garcia’s number on the conference phone. I cocked a brow at him. What was it that he found? Or, actually, what was it that he _thought_ he had found?

“Garcia—” Reid began.

“Oh, it’s the boy wonder!” she cheered. “You never call me. It’s so isolating…”

Reid smiled lightly in response. “Sorry. We’ve been a bit busy.”

“I forgive you. I guess.”

Those of us who were standing around chuckled somewhat. Reid immediately turned back to his work when he shook it off, though, so that he could get back to what it was he called her for. “Can you look up the missing persons reports on the trail, specifically young boys between the ages of nine to thirteen.”

“I’m gonna need more than that.”

“The Unsub’s probably in his late thirties to forties, so disregard any cases older than twenty years.”

“What are you doing?” Rossi asked, utterly confused.

Reid hardly acknowledged Rossi when he answered with, “Speeding up the process of identifying those kids.” He grabbed a pen. “Garcia, narrow it down to boys with dark hair only. How many do we have now?”

“Twelve.”

Emily’s eyes widened. “They’ve only found ten bodies so far.”

Reid stood tall. “Yeah, but they’re still looking. It’s entirely possible those other two boys are out there. Garcia, which of those is the oldest case?”

“Um… Victor Dane disappeared when he was ten… and that was…” Garcia paused and gulped. “Oh. Fifteen years ago. They never found out what happened to him, but Rangers at the time suspected that he just happened to get lost.” That was usually their excuse when people went missing out there.

“What time of year was that?”

“October 20th.”

Reid was scribbling notes down on a piece of paper in one of the kids’ files. “What about the other boys? Did they all disappear around that time?”

“Yeah… How did you…”

“Thanks, Garcia.” Reid hung up on her without any consideration, and he stood to face all of us.

As we all huddled around, Reid began explaining how the cogs turning in his head had just come up with a dozen different answers to the problems we were facing. For our profile of the Unsub, we were missing any kind of link between how, when, and why the victims were taken. But Reid figured it out. Now that we had the identity of another kid, he was able to connect some of the dots, but what Garcia told him explained it all clearly to him. Our Unsub was crossing stateliness, which was why no one connected the dots—and he was spending months doing so. To hike the entire trail would take about six months. He was taking his victims in the fall, and we knew from Tyler and Daniel, he was killing the boys in the winter…

He was torturing them for months on end… He got away with it because no one knew that he existed.

I cringed and took a step back and away from the group. I felt Hotch’s eyes following me, so I didn’t let any emotion show that would give away the panic building in my chest. What if Hotch had thought that I just wandered off in Hawai’i? What if he had really been convinced that I left to go back to the Mainland—that I had left him… No one knew that those men who took me existed. No one knew that there were people out there who were so loyal to The Reaper. No one knew that I was a target. I could have died if Hotch didn’t know me so well. I could have died if the team didn’t have enough trust in him and I to know that something was wrong. I could have ended up like those boys that were being dug up in the forest.

I swallowed all of my pain.

* * *

That night, Hotch forced me to go back to the hotel with him while the team stayed at the Ranger’s office to have a long night of working. I think this move of his had more to do with Hawai’i than anything else. He was worried that I wasn’t better. He thought that I was suppressing any memories or PTSD in order to trick him into thinking that I was alright. And maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t at all okay because every time I closed my eyes, I was terrified that someone else who had seen “Foyet’s website” would come to kill me, Jack, or Hotch. I was dreading a call from home while we were gone on this case that would tell us that someone took our little man from us. Foyet was always cruel. There was no doubt about it. But I never thought that it would get this far after death, after Hotch had bashed his face in to the point he was unrecognizable.

I needed rest desperately. For once, I wasn’t going to argue with Hotch about something related to dictating my life. Because I clearly needed to sleep, but Hotch didn’t, he decided to set up shop at the desk while I rolled into bed, which meant that I could afford to at least close my eyes because someone was keeping watch. Usually, Hotch fell asleep without struggle. If I were wrapped in his arms, it would take only a few minutes before he would completely crash and start snoring in my ear—but I could never fell asleep. If I did, there was a chance someone could take him from me. Something like Hawai’i could happen to him if I weren’t careful. So, I stayed up nearly every night just to ensure no one would come in and take him—or even to make sure that no one was lurking in the house to hurt Jack. But Hotch was staying up now. He was sitting at the desk, looking over the case, facing the door and the window, which was a reassurance to me that meant that no one could sneak up on him now.

So, I relaxed.

After a few minutes, I heard Hotch get up to grab his pajamas and toiletries from his go-bag and head into the bathroom. My eyes followed him until he closed the door.

I curled up on the bed, bringing my knees up ever so slightly towards my chest, and I laid my hands over my stomach. It was so odd… Everything felt normal, but it clearly wasn’t. Between the fact that Hotch was being overprotective and that I was subconsciously protecting my stomach more, it was obvious that I was pregnant; but I wasn’t showing yet, and I technically couldn’t even feel anything yet. It was just knowledge and an unconscious drive to protect something we couldn’t even see or feel. But the strangest part of it all was that I couldn’t wait to have more than that. I couldn’t wait to hold our baby, to see if they got mine or Hotch’s eyes, or what color hair they would end up with. Every second that we wasted just knowing and not seeing was torture. I was just excited to skip the next few months and finally have them in my arms.

Hotch came out of the bathroom, his face washed, teeth brushed, hair combed out of his face, and his suit switched out for his pajamas. When he saw my curled on the bed, he smiled. I smiled back at him. Despite how tense I had been about his protective behavior, I could find myself relaxing and falling in love with him over and over again every time he looked at me like that. It was this sparkle in his eyes that spoke volumes about how much he eternally loved me. And that smile… It was this slight curl at the corner of his lips that ever so slowly turned into a wide, toothy grin the longer he stared at me. It was pure joy. And it was absolutely contagious. I found that every time I spotted that smile growing on his face, I’d start smiling ear to ear, laughing at how cute and silly he was.

Aaron Hotchner… Cute and silly… It was strange to think about that sometimes—how I knew him in that capacity when no one else even got a _hint_ of that side of him. In fact, most people didn’t know that he was capable of smiling. But he was. He was capable of so much, and he was deserving of every happiness in the world. After everything he had been through, I could confidently say he earned eternal bliss.

“You okay?” he asked quietly. He always whispered when he was afraid of disturbing me because he was taken by the way I was just… existing. I wasn’t doing anything special, yet he didn’t want me to move. I could tell that he wanted to remember me like that for a little longer.

I nodded. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

“About?” He moved to sit down at the end of the bed, bringing my feet onto his lap so that he could massage them lightly. I relaxed immediately. When he started rubbing his thumb into the arch of my foot, I rotated somewhat so that I was laying on my back and looking at him.

“What Mr. Lanham said about his son,” I answered. “I’m terrified that something is going to happen to our kid, Aaron. _Terrified_. We know what’s out there—We know _who’s_ out there. How can we possibly protect them from all the evils out there?”

“We just try our best.”

“Mr. Lanham tried his best. You tried your best. What if I can’t try my best?”

Hotch moved his thumbs to the pads of my feet. “It’s hard, Y/N. I’m not going to lie. All that pain and panic you feel on behalf of Jack is going to be ten times worse now with your own flesh and blood. That doesn’t mean that you love Jack any less—please don’t take it that way. But it is different when they’re your own. So, this anxiety you’re feeling now is entirely valid. Trust me. But it’s a day by day thing. You do your best one day, and then you try even harder the next. That’s all you can do. There’s no point in dwelling on what you could have done better or what horribly thing can potentially happen.”

“And if we fail?”

“We won’t.”

“How do—”

“We won’t,” he said more sternly.

I reached out to squeeze his bicep, since that was all I could reach and reaffirm. Maybe I did understand why he wanted to protect me. Maybe he was just doing his best with me, and he felt that his day to day best wasn’t enough. But it was. Actually, it was more than enough.

“I love you.”

He kissed his way up from my ankle to my hip, slowly moving around until he was hovering over me and I was giggling at the way his kisses tickled to me. I punched at his pecks lightly in a playful attempt to make him stop. But he didn’t. He only smirked and moved to kiss my stomach. I ran my fingers through his hair, encouraging him to stay there because I loved how it felt. I loved thinking to myself that we knew something was there, though we couldn’t see it, yet he had an instinct to still show me every bit of love. Especially there.

“I love you,” he whispered against my stomach.

* * *

In the morning. Hotch and I woke to a call from the Park Rangers that two kids had just been reported missing on the trail. A boy and a girl. Robert and Ana Copeland. That didn’t match our Unsub’s M.O. at all, but we simply couldn’t take the chance. Knowing that the body count out in the forest was only increasing with every knew hole Rangers were digging out there, it was entirely possible that the Unsub was spiraling. It wasn’t worth ignoring. If it meant potentially saving those kids, we were going to at least look into it. If it turned out that it had nothing to do with our case, it would be passed on to the Rangers and local PD, who could hopefully help the parents seek closure.

Until then, we had to try our best. So, we hurried out of bed and raced to the Ranger’s office. When we got there, JJ was already setting up a search party with the Rangers and local volunteers who found out that the kids went missing and wanted to help. Hotch pulled me to the side before we stepped in.

“You should stay here with Reid, give us some outside geographical help,” he offered.

I cocked a brow at him, scoffed, then walked away. There was no fucking way I was doing that. Fucking ridiculous. “JJ,” I said, tapping her shoulder. She turned to face me. “I’ll take the far East quadrant.” I pointed to her map, signaling to the area of the forest that I was referring to. It happened to be the smallest with the least amount of volunteers to oversee, so I figured that Hotch would at least compromise on that. “And I’ll check out the—"

Hotch suddenly grabbed my bicep a little harder than expected and started pulling me to the board room to talk to me privately. He let go of my arm as I stumbled inside, catching my balance quickly before turning to face him. He was frowning like he was angry with me. My eyes followed him as he locked the door then proceeded to turn all of the blinds up so that they were closed, making it so that no one could see into the room.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked me, crossing his arms over his chest once the room was made private and dark.

I shrugged. “I’m going to go help those kids.”

He shook his head. “I’m benching you.”

“Hotch—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

He was oddly calm. Usually, if I gave him push back like this, he’d try to be a little more demanding— whether it be with his boss or Sir tone. Either would have worked on me, but he was still holding back. Asshole. Just fucking crack. Please. Give me something in response to my pushback. Recognize that I’m fucking with you because I want you back, and just _do_ something! Please!

“You can’t bench me—”

Hotch’s eyes narrowed. “I’m pulling you from the field. You shouldn’t have come back this early. And I don’t want you to get hurt, especially since there are new factors involved.”

I chuckled. So that was what this was about. I wasn’t even showing, and he was already losing his shit. This was exactly why I was scared to tell him I was pregnant in the first place. I knew that this would fucking happen. “That’s bullshit,” I snapped. I just wanted him to fight with me. Was that too much to ask? “You didn’t pull JJ out of the field until she was too pregnant to even walk.”

“That was different.”

“It really fucking isn’t, Aaron! I’m going to go out there and I’m going to help find those kids and our Unsub, and there’s really nothing you can do to stop me right now. If you want to pull me out of the field, then you’re going to have to wait until we get back to the office and tell Strauss exactly why.” I started making my way towards the door. “Until then, I’m going—"

Hotch stepped in my way, making me crash into him slightly, but he didn’t waver. “Sit down and shut up,” Hotch demanded gruffly.

I gulped and instinctively took an obedient seat on the couch. There was the Hotch I knew. I found him in there somehow, which meant that I was right about him holding back on my behalf. He still wanted to be rough with me, I could see it in his eyes; but he was doing everything in his power to not do it because he thought I was fragile. I wasn’t fragile. He knew better than anyone that I wasn’t fragile. Hopefully, all it would take was this one snap and we’d be back in business.

Hotch paced the room for a moment before stopping just in front of me. He roughly pinched my face with one hand to make me look up at him. “You want things to be normal? Fine. Stop being a brat and listen to my orders. You’re staying here with Reid, and that’s the end of it.” He let go of my face.

“Yes, Sir.” I nodded.

His chest fell as he let out a relieved sigh, “Good girl.” He ran his fingers through his hair as he caught his breath, trying to come to terms with what he had just done, and how he thought it was entirely out of line. “Sorry,” he whispered under his breath, ashamed.

I shook my head while standing. “I love you.” I took his face in my hands and kissed him gingerly. “I’m sorry for pushing your buttons.”

He kissed me back. “It’s okay.” He let go of me, and I let go of him, then, within an instant, Hotch was storming off towards the door. “Call me if you and Reid find anything.”

I hesitantly agreed, watching him leave the board room and head out with the team, the Rangers, and all of the volunteers. It was just me and Reid in the Park Ranger’s office now. He glanced over at me, confusion written all over his face, but I just shrugged it off. I didn’t need him asking questions when I was still coming to terms with it myself.

I shook my head, unfolded my arms, and headed to the map table to search it with my eyes and fingers to find anywhere that stood out to me as a good place to hide out for the winter and to keep hostages. Reid was hovering over it with a pen in hand in order to help him pinpoint certain areas. When he saw something, he circled it. The only time I spotted something, I asked him to circle it, too.

Yet, all I could think about was Hotch while I should have been thinking about those kids that were out there, scared out of their wits as a monster did who knew what with them. I should have been focused. We weren’t supposed to let our emotions get in the way, which was a main concern Hotch and I had when we initially started dating. We couldn’t forget our work. We couldn’t let our relationship get in the way of saving lives. And I was trying to remind myself of that while staring at that map, attempting to force my eyes to focus in on something, but I just couldn’t. My mind was elsewhere.

“He’s probably hiding them in a cave,” he continued. I hummed a thoughtless agreement. “Somewhere near water so that he can live off the land.” I agreed again. “And then aliens came down and took them.” I hummed again. “What’s wrong with you?” Reid asked, circling a waterfall on the map. I cocked a brow, knowing that he could sense my confusion without having to look up. “I mean… I don’t want to pry, but something’s off.”

“It’s nothing,” I insisted. I knew that he was referring to how Hotch and I were practically dancing around each other, which wasn’t like us at all— especially since we just went through something which should have only brought us closer.

Reid looked up at me through his eyelashes for a brief moment to get a profile on me. He looked back down. “It makes sense, you know,” he commented while still scribbling on the map. I raised a brow, and he sensed my confusion again, so he continued, “Hotch has lost a lot. More than anyone should have to lose. It’s no surprise that he’s being more careful with you than he ever was with anyone else. He’s had to learn and evolve based on his experiences, and that evolution has brought him to being— for a lack of a better term— a helicopter parent. I don't think he’s necessarily trying to suffocate you, like you think he is. In his mind, he’s reminding himself of everything he could have done differently with Haley that could have saved their relationship and her life, and he’s testing out these new behaviors with you.

They say that a mother’s bond with her child is the strongest connection any two humans can have; but we’re still primal creatures, and the fathers have a tendency to become overbearingly protective once they are aware that their mates are carrying their child. Think of it like a wolf marking its territory. The wolf becomes hostile towards anything or anyone that tries to come near its territory because it’s their safe space and they have an instinct to protect it with their life. Fathers of most species are the same way with the mothers of their children, and humans happen to be the worst about it because we’re more advanced creatures—”

“Reid,” I spoke up, catching his attention, “you’re rambling.”

He chuckled self-consciously. “Sorry… I’m just trying to say that… things aren’t going to go back to normal— for a while, at least. He’s trying to make up for his past mistakes. And after what happened in Hawai’i, you can understand why he’s a little uneasy and a little more protective than you’d like. It might help if both of you, I don’t know… set some rules and boundaries.”

I smirked. “Is that the doctor’s advice?”

He shook his head and looked back down at the map. “It’s your friend’s advice.”

“Thank you, Spencer.” I put a hand on his shoulder.

Suddenly, the walkie talkie on the table started buzzing with static. Mine and Reid’s attention to turn to it just before we heard Morgan’s voice echo through the room with an update from the trail, a really good update, actually. They found the daughter. She was safe with him and Emily, and they were sending her back to the office with a Ranger so that I could question her because they couldn’t find her brother anywhere yet. I picked up the walkie to acknowledge his report.

We waited about thirty minutes after the call from Morgan to see the Copelands come in with JJ from the trail while looking around for their daughter who hadn’t arrived yet. JJ showed them to the boardroom so that they could wait there. When they were sitting down and holding each other anxiously, JJ came over to me and Reid and asked if we would be fine with waiting with the Copelands while she headed back out to the trail to work with the other volunteers who had a million questions for her. I shrugged and insisted that she go. I could handle this while Reid kept looking at the map.

On her way out, JJ ran into Ana and the Ranger that had brought her back. Ana was covered in dirt, her jacket torn up, her hair knotted, her eyes sunken out of exhaustion. I didn’t see any bruises on her, though. In fact, from where I was standing, I didn’t see any sign of any kind of abuse—sexual or otherwise. It made sense. Unfortunately, our Unsub’s type was kids, but he preferred boys. Whatever happened out there in the woods, there was probably a reason that Ana was with us and not Robert. Hopefully, she could give us some answers.

After sitting around for a few minutes, watching as the Copelands held their daughter close and let her cry against them, I decided to go in. Sitting there and watching them was just breaking my heart. All it did was remind me of all the times after Haley’s death when Jack would cling to me for dear life, crying into my shoulder until my shirt was soaked and I needed to change. I had never heard anyone sob in pain like that until that dreadful day when Hotch broke down, and then Jack started having nightmares. The two of them were in pain… They just couldn’t stop sobbing and whimpering. Ana was the same way.

I couldn’t cry like that when they found me in Hawai’i. Part of me knew that if I broke down and sobbed like that, then Hotch would have been in even worse shape than he already was. Besides, I had happy news that offset how I was really feeling. We had this little miracle in our lives now, and all of my focus was being drilled into that instead of remembering the panic I felt when I saw Gene standing just behind Hotch on the beach. I had to remember that in just a few months, there would be another little Hotchner running around—just as we had always joked about—and it distracted me from waking up with nightmares of sitting in that cabin, anticipating the moment they would finally decide to get rid of me.

I couldn’t keep thinking about it. I was sick of sitting around and waiting for something to happen. So, I carefully pushed into the room that the Copelands were sitting in, and I entered with a welcoming, kind smile that would help the scared little girl warm up to me. A thought occurred to me. I was never going to let my children be that terrified. Ever. I dreaded being an overbearing parent, but I knew what was out there, and I knew what I needed to do in order to protect my family. I was going to do whatever it would take. Neither of my kids would ever have to be in Ana or Robert’s shoes. No matter what.

“Hi, Ana.” I held my hand out for her to shake, just a simple way of me building rapport with her while also making her feel more adult and brave than she really was. “My name’s Y/N Greenaway, and I’m with the FBI. I’ve been looking for you and your brother, Robert.” She shook my hand warily. As she let go, I sat down in the seat across from her and crossed my ankles over each other. “Are you up for a few questions?”

Ana nodded shyly, tucking under her mother’s arm as much as possible.

“Cool.” I smiled at her. “What do you remember?”

“I shouldn’t’ve left Robert, but he told me to run. He made me promise to go when he distracted the man.”

“You did the right thing, Ana,” I reassured her, playing along with the dodge of my original question.

“But he still has my brother.”

“You being here because you listened to your brother is going to help us, though. I promise. I need you to tell me about the man who took you if we’re going to find Robert. Can you do that?”

She nodded. “We were in a cave…” she began slowly, pondering her words carefully as she tried to push through the nightmares running through her. I knew what that felt like. “He kept us in a cage with toys. Lots and lots of toys. There were no lights, and he stole Robert’s flashlight to make sure we couldn’t see anything.”

“What about the man, Ana?”

It was great that she was already being so open and talkative, but we knew all of this because Morgan and Emily were already searching for a cave, and the Unsub was probably long gone by now if he knew that Ana had escaped. We needed to know about him specifically in order to build the profile and find him.

“He was dirty,” she answered, “and scary. He was tall and fat. He walked funny and didn’t like to talk—”

“What do you mean by ‘he walked funny’?”

“Like, with a limp…”

“So, he was hurt?”

“I think so. That was why he couldn’t catch me, but he could catch Robert. He always took Robert. Never me. He took Robert at one point, and when he came back, he was crying and shaking, and that was when he told me that I needed to run the next time the man came for him. So, Robert pretended like he had to use the bathroom, and the man left the cage unlocked… Robert pushed him over long enough for me to run.” She started to sob. “I shouldn’t have left him!” She hid her face against her mother’s chest. “I shouldn’t’ve left him!”

I rubbed my hand over her back soothingly. “You did really good, Ana. Thank you.”

There was a knock at the door from Reid, a signal that he needed to talk to me privately. I nodded to him. I had gotten everything I could get out of Ana—at least for right now—and it was probably best just to let her relax and be with her family. I knew that after Hawai’i, all I wanted was to be with our family. I wanted Hotch, Jack, Morgan, Emily, Rossi, Reid, and JJ. I needed their support. I needed to know that they were okay, because if they were, then it gave me every reason—or excuse, depending on how you looked at it—to be okay, too. Ana probably needed that right now, too.

So, I silently stepped out of the room, letting the door fall shut quietly. I crossed my arms over my chest as I looked at Reid. He lifted his phone and turned the screen to face me, at which point I saw an image of a flower I was not at all familiar with, and I really had zero clue as to why he was showing it to me. I shrugged.

Reid looked at the photo again. “Emily and Morgan found his cave.”

“Robert?”

“They’re both gone. But Emily sent me this picture.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called Devil’s Claw.”

“Which is…”

“It helps heal swollen joints. Without it, our Unsub will be in a _lot_ of pain.”

I glanced over my shoulder back into the room where Ana was hugging her parents as tight as she could—the same way Jack would always hug me and Hotch whenever he was upset. A superman hug. I looked back at Reid. “She told me that our Unsub walks with a limp. It’s probably connected.”

“If it’s really that bad that he still walks with a limp while taking this, it means he’s going to need more of it. And fast.”

“Where can you get it?”

“I mean, the flower version, like this, is all over the forest out there. But you can get it in pill or powder form on the black market, if you know where to look.”

“He’s going to head into town with Robert,” I realized. “And if he’s spending all of his time out on the trail, not working… That means he doesn’t have any money.”

“He’s going to sell Robert for drugs.”

I hesitated. “He wouldn’t give Robert away entirely. It goes against his M.O. You’re right, he’s going to sell Robert; but not the way you would think.” I hurried over to the walkie talkie sitting on the table and lifted it towards my mouth, pressing the TALK button as fast as I could. “Hotch.” I let go of the button and waited.

“I’m here,” he answered momentarily.

“Everyone needs to come back. Our Unsub isn’t out there anymore. He’s heading into town.”

And they did come back. It took a bit, but the entire team raced to get back to the Ranger’s office, at which point, we started discussing where the Unsub could have possibly gone, using our extremely loose profile we had. It really wasn’t enough to present to the Rangers or PD, but it was barely enough for us to use to our advantage. Knowing that he would have to get his medicine as fast as possible, we knew that he was going to turn to the black market—but in order to know who was possibly selling anything similar to Devil’s Claw, he had to already have connections in that world. Since we had previously deduced that he had been operating on the trail for at least fifteen years, that meant that he probably hadn’t met many criminals since then, so it had to be beforehand. But how did this pattern not appear sooner? Why hadn’t he started kidnapping children or abusing them sooner?

The simple answer was prison. It would explain why he was stagnant for a while, and why he was so fond of hiding in isolation. Not to mention, he probably met other pedophiles in there. And drug dealers. If he was desperate, he was going to meet with someone he knew and could trust to understand his medical condition, and also someone who would be willing to take time with a child as payment.

So, we called Garcia. We asked her to look for a man with a sexual assault history who was released from prison about sixteen years ago, then missed parole meetings fifteen years ago by going entirely off the grid. One would be shocked by how many men matched that description. So, we asked her to look for someone who had originally been housed near other registered sex offenders before going missing. That did the trick.

His name was Shane Wyland, and he had a _long_ medical history when he was in prison. I mean, sex offenders were top targets inside, but he went to the infirmary more than the average pedophile. When I asked if it had to do with swollen joints, she agreed. She told us that Shane had a condition that made it increasingly difficult to keep moving around, even with the medication he was getting. But, in prison, they didn’t have what he needed. So, he had to get it from his bunk mate, another pedophile who was released around the same time as Shane.

“We need an address for his bunk mate,” Hotch insisted.

“That’s the thing,” Garcia began while still typing in order to get the address to us ASAP, “there are a handful of registered sex offenders who all share the same address.”

“What?” I questioned.

“It’s a cluster,” Emily said. When we all cocked a brow at her, she continued, “Since sex offenders can’t be near parks or school zones, their housing options are limited. Usually, they’ll reach out to their buddies from prison and ask if they know anywhere that will house them. That’s how they all end up with each other.”

Hotch shook his head. He hissed, “ _Garcia_ , the address, please.”

“Right. Sorry, sir.” She pressed the ENTER key of her computer as hard as she could, and we all felt our phones buzz.

As they all looked at their phones to take note of the building number and street name, I watched Hotch to see if there was any way he would let me go. They had a whole building to clear. I could be an asset. My time was better spent clearing the building with them than sitting around in the Park Ranger’s office, counting the minutes until the team would return. I really fucking hated feeling useless.

The team started collecting their gear, throwing on vests as fast as they could and putting comms in their ears. I waited for Hotch to tell me one way or the other. But, when I didn’t do anything, he didn’t seem to argue. I figured that if I were to move towards them and start gearing up, too, that was when things would have spiraled. All I could do was shake my head in disappointment and move to take a seat at the table with Reid. He was staying behind in case that lead didn’t pan out, which wasn’t very likely, but it was still a good idea to have back up. But he didn’t need me there. That was a one person job, and we all fucking knew it.

“Hey—” JJ called out, hurrying over to me. She slowed as I turned to face her. “Are you and Hotch alright?”

I peered over her shoulder to see Hotch talking to Morgan about how they were going to narrow down where the Unsub was and how we were going to get to him without letting the kid get hurt or die. I looked back at her. “Hotch is trying to pull me out of the field after this case, and we had a fight about it.”

“Oh…” She looked at her feet, almost like she regretted asking in the first place.

Ever since the bombing case in New York, I stopped opening up to JJ about my relationship with Hotch. She had insisted that she thought that Hotch and I were taking things to fast, and she almost seemed to doubt us. It really wasn’t until our wedding that I saw that she had changed her mind. But that was a little too late. By that point, I didn’t necessarily care about any opinion she had on my relationship. I valued her as a friend and a team member, of course; but… this… I just…

“Well,” she began hesitantly, “I know that you’ll figure it out. The two of you always get through it. I hardly hear about you guys fighting, so I wouldn’t stress over it too much.”

I nodded and shrugged. I mean, she was right, actually—kind of throwing what I just thought back in my face. But still. Hotch and I had always been honest and open with each other, which was why we were so successful. If I just listened to Spence, used my words and tried to level with Hotch, then we could sort all of this out and come to a better conclusion than pulling me out of the field entirely.

When they left without a word to me or Reid, I sat down across from Reid. We sat in silence for nearly thirty minutes as we waited around uselessly. The team let us know when they arrived in the city; and they let us know how they were splitting up. Rossi and Hotch were going to stay outside while Emily and Morgan were going to head inside, and JJ was going to coordinate with the local PD that had just appeared on site. A few minutes later, the comms started buzzing with back-and-forths.

“Hey, Hotch,” Emily said into the comms. “It looks like Robert was in the apartment, and there was a struggle. There’s a chance he could have escaped, which means that Shane and his bunk mate are probably chasing him around right now.”

Hotch responded, “Alright. You and Morgan continue to search the building, I’ll start a perimeter set up out here.”

“Got it.”

The comms went quiet again. I pouted and slumped forward, resting my elbows on my knees. Reid watched me through his lashes like he was trying not to stare at me. I glanced back at him. When our eyes met, he cleared his throat and shuffled around in his seat to make it look like he was keeping busy with the files in front of him. I rolled my eyes.

“You remember when you were shot in the leg and Hotch made you stay at the office during cases?” I asked quietly, moving to pick at the wood table in an attempt to cure my boredom. Reid hummed an agreement. “How did you not go crazy?”

Perhaps that wasn’t the right wording I should have used around him… He was always nervous about his dilaudid problem and the fear that his mother’s schizophrenia could be passed onto him. “Crazy” wasn’t exactly the right term for Spencer Reid. He was our resident genius, and that put a lot of pressure on him, and I wished that he knew that he wasn’t crazy, but I could tell that he thought he was. So, I almost felt bad for the slip up. But Reid genuinely didn’t seem to notice, which was a relief.

Reid crossed his legs, getting himself comfortable, and he looked back up at me with a little more confidence this time around. “I’m not gonna lie, Y/N, it wasn’t fun. None of us are used to sitting at Quantico all day like Garcia is. When Hotch officially benched me after Hankle and getting shot, there were times when I thought I was going crazy. I was extremely anxious while just sitting around all day. And I was killing myself with worry that one of you—or maybe all of you—wouldn’t come home one day… But I had to suck it up and just go with it until I got better because I knew that, ultimately, Hotch was just trying to protect me. Now, he’s just trying to protect you, too. He’d do it for any one of us for any number of reasons. My advice is the same as before. Talk to him, Y/N. And, if that doesn’t work, then just… suck it up and get through the next few months, because no matter how often you argue with him, you’re not going to win. Trust me. I tried.”

“I hate arguing with him, Spencer…”

He nodded. “I know. That’s why it might just be best to let him win this one.”

I lowered my head and leaned back again to focus on kicking the carpet. “Yeah.” Maybe he was right. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t have been taking advice from Spencer Reid, the guy who never had a girlfriend in his life… but his advice was surprisingly nice and welcoming.

“Hotch, we’ve got Robert, but Shane’s gone. We think he might be in the immediate vicinity,” Emily said over the comm again.

I smiled. They got him. They found Ana, and now they had found Robert. Knowing how many cops were crawling around that neighborhood now that Hotch had created that a perimeter, Shane Wyland was probably long gone. There was no way in hell he stuck around long enough to see if he could get Robert back. He likely knew as well as I did that if he managed to escape, he could keep taking other boys like Robert, and he could keep getting away with it. Even now that we knew who we were looking for, the trail was too long for us to track him. He was a ghost in the wind. But none of that necessarily mattered right now. This was technically a win for us. We saved two kids from a monster, and we discovered who that monster was. At least we could keep an eye out for Wyland in the future.

I stood and walked to the boardroom to tell the Courtlands the news. When I told them that their son was alive and well, they jumped to their feet while letting out breaths of relieve, and demanded to see him immediately. I told them that a Ranger would be driving them to the hospital in the city. Within an instant, they were pushing past me, racing to go seek out a Ranger that could take them as soon as possible. I didn’t take offense to that, though. I knew that they were overwhelmed by their joy of knowing that their son was alive, and all they wanted now was to hold him in their arms. It reminded me of Hotch when he found me in Hawai’i.

Hotch…

I sat down on the couch in silence and reflected on what just happened, and what I was inevitably going to say to him. I loved him. I would protect him to every end. In fact, we said as much to each other in our wedding vows a month ago. Maybe Reid was right about not trying to fight all of this, and instead just let Hotch win this time around because it was easier than making a big deal out of it. Inevitably, I was going to get back to work. Probably in about a year or so. And as shitty as that seemed, at least it meant I got to go back. Hotch could have totally insisted that I quit the FBI—though I knew he would never ask me to do that; so, at least he was giving me the chance to still work out of the field. I could live with that for the time being. However, what I needed to discuss with Hotch more than anything was his behavior and how he was going about protecting me, because I really didn’t need him to stifle me through all of this. After being trapped in that cabin in Hawai’i, I never wanted to be trapped anywhere ever again.

When I saw him turn the corner into the office a few hours later after they gave up on looking for Shane Wyland, I nodded sideways towards the doorway I was standing in, letting him know that I needed him to join me. He silently noticed. As the team patted each other on the back and celebrated getting the kid back safe and sound, Hotch quietly and politely excused himself from everyone. They didn’t seem to stop him. Reid saw what was going on, though, and he sent me a supportive smile that let me know I was doing the right thing.

Hotch walked past me into the room, and I closed the door behind him. “Aaron, we need to talk.” I sat down on the couch, but he leaned back against the table with his arms crossed over his chest. He was listening. “I understand that you’re just trying to do what you think is best for me. I know that you think that keeping me locked up in the tower will keep me safe. And I appreciate all of that. I really do. In fact, I love that you want to protect me and take care of me, but you need to realize that at some point, you need to take a step back. That I can’t be babied, Aaron. It’s not in my nature, and we both know that. I can’t have you hovering over my shoulder every second of every day while telling me that I can and can’t do my job. I _can_ do this. It wasn’t unreasonable for me to go out and look for those kids, but it was unreasonable for me to ask to go looking for the Unsub in the city—I know that. I know myself and I know my limits. I’m not going to suddenly break just because I’m pregnant. I’m okay right now.

“When I need to take a step back from the field, I will do so without hesitation or argument; but until then, you need to keep letting me do my job the way I’m supposed to. I just need you to believe in me—"

“If I didn’t believe in you, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.”

“If you believe in me, then just… act like it! Why is it that I always have to go above and beyond to support you and your dreams, but I’m stifled because you’re scared? You believe in me, but you don’t—”

“You have always been able to do what you wanted, Y/N! I have done everything I can to restrain myself from being controlling in _every_ aspect of our lives, despite the fact that it’s all I know. I grew up in a household where my father was controlling, manipulative, and abusive. That was how I learned to become a man, and I always thought that would work because I was young and naïve; but Haley left, and you came along— and you…” He took in a deep breath. “You have always been this wild and free spirit that I knew I couldn’t control, so I wanted to step back and let you thrive because I know you’re capable of so much, Y/N. Do you remember that I wouldn’t even fucking look at you when you joined the team because I was so fucking in love with you that I didn’t know how to stop myself from letting my feelings trump your dreams? But you came waltzing into my office, demanding answers, and the next thing I knew, you were meeting Jack and telling me that you love me. I have had to fight an inner battle every single day since meeting you between screaming from the top of my lungs how much I love you and want to hide you away from the cruelness of this world, and letting you spread your wings and flourish as an agent. You deserve every bit of happiness, and I know that a lot of that comes from your work, so I never want to step on your toes. But you’re my wife, Y/N. I made a vow to you that I would protect you, no matter what. And, you’re right… maybe I’m being more protective with you than I have with anyone in the past, but can you blame me? Dammit, with everything I’ve been through, can you blame me for not wanting to lose you, too?”

His eyes wandered to my stomach as he sat back down. “We’re having a baby, Y/N. I’m not just protecting you anymore, and you’re not just taking care of yourself anymore. What happens if you get shot, hmm? What happens if you get stabbed like Foyet did to me? What happens if you get taken again like in Hawai’i? What happens if I lose you like I lost Kate and Haley? Am I just supposed to pretend like I wouldn’t die without you here? Am I supposed to forget about you and the best few years of my life? Why do I have to pretend like I don’t care just to make you feel better about yourself? Since meeting you, I could never bear the thought of losing you, but now I can’t bear the thought of losing either of you,” he pressed a palm to my stomach. “Aren’t my feelings valid, too? Don’t I get a say in the safety of our child?” He cupped my face with his other hand. “Please don’t make me lose you, too. I won’t _live_ if I lose you.” He sniffled as a tear slid down his cheek. I reached up and carefully wiped it away with my thumb. “I believe in you, Y/N, more than I even believe in myself…” He screwed his eyes shut as the tears started to fall faster. “But I don’t want to lose you because you’re too damn stubborn to just sit out of the field for a few months.” He sniffled again. “Why is it so hard for you to just understand that I love you so much that it hurts to even think about being away from you? Can’t you just accept that I want what’s best for you— I always have— and right now that means keeping you safe from any harm.”

I rested my forehead against his. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Y/N. I just need you to understand that I love you. More than anything.”

I kissed away a tear running down his cheek. “I know, baby.”

“If I didn’t believe in you… I couldn’t have stood before all of our friends and family a month ago, and said, ‘This is the person I can’t bear to lose. This is the one thing in my life I can’t lose.’ That’s what I thought we agreed on…”

He reached out and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me in for a hug so that he could hide his face in the crook of my neck. I tangled my fingers in his hair. I hadn’t meant to upset him, but I just needed him to know how I was feeling—but I had never stopped to ask myself how he was feeling, which was incredibly selfish of me.

“How about this,” I began offering carefully, waiting to see if he would stop me, but he didn’t, “when I start to show, I’ll stay back at the office with Garcia.” It wasn’t what I wanted, but if it made him feel better, I was willing to make that compromise.

He sniffled and sat up. We held each other’s faces, searching each other’s eyes, trying to find a reason that we shouldn’t agree to that. But there was no reason not to. If it were up to him, I would be sitting at home for the next few months, but that wasn’t reasonable for me; and if it were up to me, I would be in the field up until the day I was giving birth, but Hotch would never let that happen in a million years. At least, being at Quantico meant that I could still help with the cases and the profiles.

“The office or the house at any given moment,” he negotiated.

I shrugged and nodded.

“Okay.” He leaned in to kiss me before hugging me again, our chins tucked over each other’s shoulders. “I love you.”

I grabbed onto the fabric of his shirt on his back, feeling the way his broad shoulders tensed, and his breathing had slowed. I smiled lightly against him. We were going to be okay. “I love you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hi, my loves. I might be taking a very short break. School is..... it's a lot right now. I think that between school and the way my friends have been getting into my head about Criminal Minsd/Hotch/Thomas, I've just kind of fallen out of love temporarily. I'm finishing up Sense8 rn, and then I'm going to start watching Tales of the City to help revamp my love for Thomas, and in turn Hotch and Criminal Minds. Chapter 43 is going to be a long one, so I just need ya'll to bear with me for a bit as I get to writing it. I love you guys! <3


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